For Some Holocaust Survivors, Even Liberation Was Dehumanizing
For Some Holocaust Survivors, Even Liberation Was Dehumanizing
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/magazine/for-some-holocaust-survivors-even-liberation-was-dehumanizing.html
“If their eyes were mirrors, it seems I’m not far from dead.” After being freed by Allied troops, some former prisoners continued to be mistreated.
By Jennifer Orth-Veillon
April 28, 2020
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Some liberators treated the surviving prisoners this way not only because they were disgusted by the reality of the heinous crimes committed upon them, but also because they were poorly prepared for what they would find. The historian Robert Abzug, who studied the way American G.I.s reacted to liberation, found that even the most “battle-weary” service members were stunned, unable to reconcile the Nazi terrors with their bloodiest memories of combat. Yet Allied intelligence had known that Jews were being rounded up, deported and massacred for years. In August 1944, major American newspapers covered the Soviet discovery of Maidanek, an extermination camp near the Polish city of Lublin. Similarly, in late January and February 1945, the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz made headlines, but these reports didn’t seem to prepare the soldiers for what they would find. When Captain Hagood was being taken to Hannover-Ahlem, he thought it was a prisoner-of-war facility, which he might have assumed would follow fair treatment laws outlined in the Geneva Conventions that Germany signed in 1929. He wrote: “All the grisly scenes I’d witnessed in four years of combat paled as I viewed the higgedly-piggedly stack of cadavers.”
Unlike Semprún and Levi, who met their liberators while still in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Ruth Kluger encountered her first American in the town center of Straubing, Germany, after escaping Christianstadt. In her memoir, “Still Alive,” she recalled that when her mother told him they had fled a concentration camp, he put his hands over his ears, having apparently had his fill of those who claimed to be camp survivors. “Here was my first American, and he deliberately closed his ears,” she recalled. “One thing, I figured, was certain: this war hadn’t been fought for our sake.”
Some of these reactions suggest soldiers were experiencing a kind of shock, while others point to anti-Semitism, even within the most senior echelons of the military. After inspecting displaced persons camps in Germany in summer of 1945, Earl G. Harrison, a lawyer and American representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, expressed harsh criticism of the ways Jews were treated by the Americans, claiming evidence of conditions similar to the Nazi-run concentration camps from which they had been freed. He summarized his observations by stating, “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” When President Harry Truman read the report, he ordered Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to inspect displaced persons camps. During a visit to a camp in Bavaria, Gen. George S. Patton told Eisenhower that he blamed the refugees for the squalor. He complained they were “pissing and crapping all over the place,” and wanted to open his own concentration camp “for some of these goddamn Jews.” Maj. Irving Heymont, who was stationed at the Landsberg displacement camp, said in his letters that some Americans proclaimed that they preferred German civilians, who seemed normal, to the Jewish survivors, whom they characterized as animals undeserving of special treatment.
Despite these racist views, meaningful connections happened in the days and months following liberation — on physical and social levels. Survivors reported that liberators who handled their bodies gently in the days following liberation — when the slightest medical error meant life or death for those in the most critical condition — brought an immediate sense of restored humanity. Levi compared baths from Soviet nurses to the one forced upon him by American military personnel. The nurses washed “with tender hands” and “soaped, rubbed, massaged, and dried” him “from head to foot.” This bath was not one “of humiliation, no grotesque-devilish-sacral bath, no black-mass bath like the first one which had marked our descent into the concentration camp universe nor was it a functional antiseptic, highly automatized bath, like that of our passage into American hands many months later.”
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Jennifer Orth-Veillon, a freelance writer and university lecturer based in Lyon, France, holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Emory University. Between 2016 and 2019, she curated “WWrite: A Blog Exploring WWI’s Influence on Contemporary Writing and Scholarship” for the United States World War I Centennial Commission.
There are photos at the link. They are stark and while not graphic are possibly triggering.
