Lee Berg – The Texas Liberators

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May 2, 1994

I graduated from Gulf Coast Military Academy. . . . I had made a summer trip with a friend of mine as a work away to Europe for two and a half months. My parents gave me two hundred dollars and his parents gave him two hundred dollars and when we got to London, we jumped ship and we traveled Europe. And we did that for about two and a half months. That was back in 1934–35, somewhere in there. I was very young. Like a merchant marine—a cotton ship.

I got back to the United States and landed in Jacksonville, Florida, and I called my father and told him that I was going to stay in the merchant marines and I was going to make a ten-month trip to the Far East. I was seventeen, eighteen then, and he said, “Well, Mother and I’d like to see you before you do that.” And I said, “Well, I’m going to New Orleans. The boat is going to New Orleans. And you can pick us up in New Orleans.” Well, when I got to New Orleans, my father was there in his car and he put me in his car and drove me to Gulf Coast Military Academy. And that’s where I went instead of going to the Far East.

. . . [It was 1934 when we jumped ship in Europe] and we had no idea [what was going on there then]. . . . We jumped ship in London and we got our way to the coast of England, hitchhiking. And then we got a ferry boat that took us across the channel. And when we got across the channel, we bought old beat-up bicycles and we bicycled our way to Paris. . . . We didn’t have backpacks in those days. In those days, we had old, beat-up bicycles. We just had what we were wearing. And we basically lived off the land. We did have two hundred dollars, and that took us a long way, and then when we got to Paris, we went to Belgium, and from Belgium off to Holland. On our bicycles. . . . Then when we got up to Holland, we turned ourselves in to the immigration people and they said they’d been looking all over Europe for us and they put us back on the same ship that we came over on and they sent us back to the United States.

. . . I went to military school and graduated. Then went to University of Illinois, went there for two years, came home, went to work, and that’s where I picked up and joined the Thirty-Sixth Division and went into the service, and that’s when the war start-ed a year later.

From the Elbe River, this is the area of when we went south and got into the concentration camp of Dachau outside of Munich. Well, we were sent down to try to assist in the— You can imagine the chaos that we ran into walking into this camp. . . . The thing that is so distinct is the smell. . . . You can’t imagine. And the bodies. (Cries gently. Overwhelmed.)

[We were one of the first troops in Dachau.] And there was a— (Breaks down from the memory.) It’s hard to describe how you can walk into a situation like that. I mean it’s just, you just walk in and you really and truly can’t imagine what has happened. No. . . . I mean you had heard that these atrocities were going on but you’re young, you’re—you’re fighting a war, but when you actually walk in and you see it and you smell it, it’s just unbelievable.

Well, I saw, I saw people without clothes on. Dead. Stacked up. The odor was just, you can’t imagine human beings living or being treated that way. I mean, it’s hard to visualize how any-body, anybody, I mean you possibly think that beasts live like that, but it’s utterly impossible in your mind to think that one human being would do that to another human being. I mean it’s just something that you— I don’t know how to explain it.

Well, all I can remember is that I went up this road and I saw this tremendous fenced-in area, buildings inside of it, but the odor. I mean, I think the odor is what made me sicker than any-thing else. I mean I saw the bodies. Of course, I had seen bodies in war or that had been decaying and all of that, but I had never, I had never smelled anything like that before. And it just seemed to get into your taste and everything. I looked around me and I said, “My God, how can you treat people this way? Or why do you treat people this way? I mean, you don’t treat animals like this.” Sure, sure, I knew who they were—[Jewish people]. But at the time, I don’t know. . . . I think that was my first realization what this war was all about.

And that was the way they were treating the people. And it was just, I couldn’t— It’s just hard to describe, how they— And at that point in time, I remember, I went back there at camp that night or a couple days or two or three days, I don’t remember, time had just— I know I couldn’t eat. I don’t think I ate anything for weeks. Every time I saw food, I got nauseated. And I think that’s when I wrote the rabbi a letter.

. . We knew we were going into a concentration camp. But we didn’t know exactly, I didn’t know that it was going to be this type of a camp. We were just told, I was just told, “Lieutenant, take these troops. You’re going into a concentration camp.” And then what we had to do was to create some kind of order. Every-thing was havoc. Get these people, bodies buried, properly sorted out, and just assist every way that we possibly could.

I don’t remember any conversations with any of them. . . .

But me being the only Jewish officer, I think it possibly af-fected me more than it did anybody else. Or I felt it did. Maybe. Maybe at this point in time in my life, I think I grew up at this point. I think up to that time I’d been very— But when I saw that, it ages you. It ages you mentally and physically.

. . . [Before I’d walked into the camps, I’d heard stories about atrocities.] You can imagine, twenty-five, twenty-six years old, fighting a war, you’d hear about these things. But you said to yourself, “Well, did this really happen?” And then all of a sudden (slaps hands together), you see it. And you know it’s happened. . . . [I’d heard they were doing this to the Jews.] Oh, sure. Oh, certainly. And then you knew it was there. Because you were seeing it. You couldn’t help from not knowing it was there. You saw the people with the marks on them. And you knew that it was a concentration camp.

. . . There were some German civilians left at the camp. Sure were. And you hated them. You hated them. But you know— In other words, you can make excuses for them, but it was just like anybody else. You know, they were given instructions. If they didn’t do it, they would’ve gotten killed. I mean, that’s basically the only attitude that you could take, that they were carrying out instructions from up above.

I was there maybe a week. [I went back every day. We cleaned the camp up.] . . . I knew nothing about any of the other camps. I only knew about Dachau.

We were mostly disposing of the bodies and burying the bodies and trying to get out some of the filth that was in the camp. And that took a considerable amount of time, even after we left, I’m sure.

I have no idea [how many bodies I buried]. Of course, a lot of them were already buried, in ditches. There was a tremendous job of trying to determine who, what, when, and where. At that point in time, they had . . . very little identification.

. . . We had heard some of the people say how these people had been hauled in and came in on boxcars, and women were thrown into one group and men thrown into another. The thing that really disturbed me, I think as much as anything else, was the mistreatment of the women. Just, they were just absolutely treated terrible. I mean, stripped of all their clothing, humiliated. Just, the way they described it, it’s just hard to believe. That human beings would do anything like that. . . .

[I saw them on the other side of the fence. Skinny.] No food. And of course, the main thing we tried to do with the ones that were still alive was to get them out and get them someplace and to get them protected. Put clothing on them.[I was told this was a camp where they brought Jews.] We were told we were going to Dachau to liberate a Jewish concentration camp. Yes.

I remember the women and the men. Older men too.

My attitude, I think, after that was completely changed. I think that I aged. I think that aged me. I think that up until that time, I don’t think I really was a man. When I saw that, I said, “This war can’t go on like this. This is unbelievable.”

[I wrote to my rabbi] within the first two or three days. I didn’t remember writing this letter until . . . [my friend] brought to my attention a copy of the letter . . . [the rabbi] had written to me.

This letter was dated in May of 1945. [It is] from Rabbi David Lefkowitz of Temple Emmanuel in Dallas.

I can well understand the effect that German brutality visited upon the Jewish people has had on you. Of course every Jew feels the same, but I wonder whether the Jews will remember and the world in general will not forget? They are showing pictures of the horrors of the concentration camps here in the United States, but even these views may not bring home to some people, perhaps to many people, the lessons that underlie the whole horrible story. Namely that we must guard against all outbursts of racial and religious hatred and must conserve religion against that kind of paganism that made these horrors possible. I see you are working in a displaced persons camp. That must be a pretty sad place. Be as gentle and as thoughtful to those people as you possibly can. They have suffered much.

This has been the first time in my life that I have ever discussed this with anybody as much as I have with you. But I think it’s important that I did.

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