Hank Josephs – The Texas Liberators

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October 22, 2011

So I remember the Holocaust, which means ‘remembrance,’ so we remember the indignity suffered by so many different peoples—deaths and starvation and beatings and surgical instances.

. . . I have a confession to make. The first forty years I was married, I didn’t say a word about it. It was too horrible to dredge up my memory. But then I—in twenty-oh-one [2001]—I wrote my autobiography so my kids would know what their father had gone through. And I have four children, a boy and three girls. And so I wanted them to know what I thought, where I was, where I’ve been, my situation, so that they would know.

My mother came with her four siblings to the United States in
1922, and I helped them celebrate their fiftieth anniversary here
in this country at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio. So I
had a bunch of uncles and aunts, and I admired them all. They
pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and were very success-
ful. My father was in the dry-goods business, and he had a hard
time making a living. But he believed in going where the money was, so he came to—first to Ingleside, then Refugio, then Kilgo-
re, Texas, and then Corpus Christi, to the Saxet Field, which is
Texas spelled backwards. So he came where the oil was, because
that’s where the money was. And he— We never missed a meal,
and I’m very grateful.

I had a wonderful father, a wonderful mother. I was very for-
tunate. My father was an incurable romantic, as I am, and my
mother was a businesswoman. She loved business, and she was
very successful. She paid her bills on the first of the month like
a clock. And she had been in charge of their grocery store in
Zhitomir, which is near Kiev in Ukraine, in Russia. And she was
twelve years old. When everybody else was out playing or going
to synagogue, she was working. So my—that was my mother’s
benefit of life, was that she was the manager of their little gro-
cery store that they had, where people were so poor, they used to
come in and they used to buy one kopek of butter or a piece of
bread. So when she married my dad, who was very romantic—
They had met at a synagogue picnic, and they fell in love. And he
wrote her poetry in Romanian. He was from Bucharest, Roma-
nia. His name was Josepovich originally. And wrote her poetry
in Romanian, sang to her, and eventually married her. And I’m
a product of that. I’m a progeny of that marriage, luckily. I’m lucky I had a well-educated father. He loved to read. Read all of
the romantic writers of his time. And—that didn’t prepare me
for World War II.

So when I was sixteen years old, I started college. So I’d had
two years in college by the time I was drafted at age eighteen,
and first thing I knew, I was sent overseas. You know, after three
months in the service, I was not prepared for what faced me,
but all I knew was, Thou shalt not kill. And they stuck a rifle in
my hand and said, Thou shall kill thy enemy. So we went to an
unknown enemy, and we killed them.

I was inducted at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, 1944, in
February, and I was sent to Camp Maxey, up near Weatherford,
Texas, and went through basic training there—six-week basic.
And we shipped over to England—Liverpool, landed in Liver-
pool, England. And we were training to invade Normandy. We
didn’t know it, but we were. And we trained, and it was so cold
there it would freeze your head off up in Liverpool—near Liver-
pool. Nottingham was where we were. And the wind just whis-
tled through those tents like there was nothing there. And there
was a little stove in the center of the tent. It was an eight-man
tent. And the wind just whistled through there, and there was
a charcoal fire going, but that didn’t help much. Couldn’t take a
shower, because the showers were outside, and it was cold, cold,
cold, as only England can get cold. That’s what I said then. Of
course, it was colder in Belgium.

So from England, we took off from Bournemouth after a cou-
ple of months of training there. And we boarded a ship and, on
June the fifth, 1944, we boarded a ship and took off for the French
coast, and we landed and invaded Normandy, Omaha Beach. Fol-
lowed the Second Ranger Battalion in. So we were the first ones
on the beach, actually. And a sergeant friend of mine, a good
friend of mine, he was the only Jewish fellow in my company. He
got hit by bullets the moment we hit the beach. He said, “Don’t
worry, Tex. I’ll get you up the beach. It’s a walk in the park.” It
was the first time I’d heard that, too. So he got shredded. He got
shot by— You know, a dozen bullets entered his body. He was
dead. I laid down in back of him and heard the bullets thud into
him. And when they stopped to reload, during the silence I got
up and took off for the—the hill, which was about fifty feet high,
of sand, where the Germans were, and pillboxes. And there were sand traps and barbed wire and land mines, so I was damn lucky
to get up there. And a company of engineers had put a bunch of
TNT boxes in where the sand was the shallowest, and they blew
it up to smithereens. And we went through there and into where
the Germans were. And we killed them. We had fire-blowers and
machine guns and we were— You either kill or be killed.

Well, do you want me to tell you that it was a beautiful day for
a ride? We were atop the Bavarian mountains looking down at
little villages, which gleamed in the sun. People were sweeping
up the cobblestones. And we were told to go down and check
on a little town near München, Munich, called Dachau. And we
were on our way to Dachau to find out what was going on there.
And we got there and the first thing we saw when we got to—
to Dachau was a sign over the entrance which says “Work Will
Make You Free.” Arbeit Macht Frei. So we went through the gate
there with three—about three dozen cabins. They had about fifty
men each, I guess. And some trucks and some places we felt
were gashouses, where people were gassed.

. . . I looked at the prisoners in their striped garb, so filthy and
decimated. One of them moved, and I went over to him and he
said, “Bist a Yid?” Are you Jewish? I said, “Ich bin a Yid.” I am
Jewish. And then I told him, “Alles geet. Alles geet.” I speak a little
Yiddish, which is pig-German. And—“Alles geet. Alles geet.” All is
good. All is good. And I opened my C rations and fed him a little
soup—made a little soup for him. And he died two hours later in
my arms. And I asked him what his name was. He said, “Meine
namen ist Herman.” “Ich.” My name is Herman, too. So I had
tears in my eyes, and I cry every time I think about it. This poor
guy, he was about forty years old and weighed about fifty pounds,
maybe. And that’s how much he had been maltreated.

That’s a hell of a load for a young fellow, nineteen years old. It
was May of 1945. And we went— Or late April. And that was when
we went to Dachau. I had no idea that people—there were—so
many people were in prison. Pentecostal people, priests, poli-
ticians, especially Jews had—behind bars, behind barbed wire,
and treated like animals—worse than animals. There were beds
there that—boards I might say. Hard boards they slept on. They were so tired when they got through working them that they just
collapsed, I figured. So big, that’s a hard load for a young fellow.

[I was sent to Dachau because] I was part of I&R, intelligence
and reconnaissance. And they sent us down there to check and
see what was going on. They knew about concentration camps,
but we didn’t. So then they sent us to investigate what was going
on as far as concentration camps was concerned, and we found
out quickly. It was a horrible experience. We had been through
four battles already, and we thought we were immune from be-
ing shocked, but that was quite a shock. Blew—blew my mind.
Had no idea such a thing existed.

When I entered the concentration camp, I figured when they
said Arbeit Macht Frei—means “Work Makes You Free”—I said,
“That’s funny. That’s odd because it’s not true.” But they made
the people believe it. And they—they gassed them. They killed
them, lots of them. And I kept thinking, there’s so many won-
derful lives wasted. Composers, artists, scientists were killed
just because Hitler said, “We—we—all non-Aryans, we want to
kill them.” And he was hell on wheels. Non-Aryans—you’re a
non-Aryan, you weren’t—the perfect race. The Germans thought
they were. He inculcated that in them.

We saw about three dozen barracks and a few automobiles
and gas chambers. And we knew what they were for. There were
people lying in the gas chambers, dead. And they had a ravine—
ravine there and they had piled the bodies in the ravine and put
lye on them. [How] can one man be that way toward another man
and call himself a human being? That’s more of an animal than
a human being.

[I]t made me very proud to be able to say that I helped liberate a
concentration camp. It made me a little different from other peo-
ple who did not have that privilege, so that’s the way I felt about
it. I felt very proud to have done it, to have held a guy in my arms
until he passed away, see what war can do. It made me hate war.

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