Sigmund Liberman – The Texas Liberators

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December 14, 2011

Well, I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. And my mother was born in Ceylon, India. Her father was an English—followed the English army as a tailor. She came to San Francis-co at six years old. And she was lost during the earthquake [ca. 1906], and they found her. And then they moved to Seattle. My father came over from Poland at ten years old and went to San Francisco with—to meet his uncle. And then he went to Seattle, and then went to Alaska before World War I. And he came out to enlist in the army. And he was not drafted, but he did not serve. He was—[had] something wrong with him.

And I was just raised there as a normal kid. I went to Garfield High School. I was the editor of our high school paper and went on to college. I wanted to become a journalist at that time, but my father said, “No, you’re going to be an engineer or doctor or lawyer, one of the professions.” And so I ran away from home and went to Alaska after one year of college, because I could not afford it. And he wouldn’t contribute to my college other than the fields that he wanted.

I went to Alaska and worked for the US Army Engineers [US Army Corps of Engineers] for two years. And we were building a navy base at Seward, Alaska, on December 7. And the Japanese did fly over Seward. People don’t know that, but they did fly over. And I was very friendly with the commander of the base that we were building. I was assistant to the superintendent and, as a result, he asked me to join the navy. So I came out to join the navy air force. And I was color-blind at that time, so they wouldn’t take me. So I enlisted in the army. And I came to Texas—Weatherford, Texas—as an infantry trainee. And then the infantry sent me to Fordham University as an engineering cadet for a year under the AST Program [ASTP, or Army Specialized Training Program]. And I was at Fordham and the army recalled all those students, and we all went to Camp Carson, Colorado, and joined the 104th Timberwolves.

[Being of Polish descent, my father watched the events in Eu-rope.] . . . His sister was left there with two children. And her husband and the family were on a train going to Dachau. And the father pushed her and the two kids off the train when they were traveling through France. And so she lived with the French people during the war. And he was—went to concentration camp and was cremated. But we finally found her in Antwerp, Belgium. And so my father and I paid her way and sent her to Israel, and she died in Israel. But her daughter came to New York and worked for a French railroad. And her son stayed in Israel and became a major in the tank force during the war.

The same guy in a foxhole with you. And when somebody got shot who was close to you, it really worried you. And my men, a couple of times when we were surrounded by Germans, we were in a warehouse filled with turnips. And knowing that I was Jewish, my comrades put us in this big pile of turnips, covered us up so we wouldn’t be captured, and three or four of them surrendered and were sent to a POW camp. And it was a good thing the Germans didn’t shoot into the turnips. They came in with their bayonets and poked in, but we were further in than they were. So that was one of my scariest positions and one that showed real camaraderie with my fellow soldiers.

I mean, they were with me, you might say, because of close camaraderieship of all of us. And we were really pretty close together. And one time our jeep driver, who was a Mexican from Nogales, Arizona, came and brought food to us through the enemy lines, because we were stranded. And so everybody knew what each other stood for. And I guess being Jewish, they respected me. And being in the infantry and not back in quarter-master or something, they had respect for me even greater.

[We’d] heard on the news [about the Nazi strategy toward the Jewish people] and everything. And the Stars and Stripes would have stories. We knew about it, but I didn’t know we were going to go to a concentration camp where you would get close to it. Nordhausen was a confinement camp for workers. Nobody was shot or killed—was shot. They all starved to death. They were Polish and French and Russian workers that worked on the V-2 bomb at Nordhausen. And the Germans in the city said they couldn’t know—they didn’t know anything about that camp. Yet you could smell the stench of the dead people seven, eight miles away.

[Our] troops—the 104th was assigned to the city of Nordhausen. And they heard about this concentration camp, so they sent me out there because I could speak a little German, and I could speak Yiddish a little bit. So I understood. And they sent me to the camp to help them, whatever was necessary. And we tried to get all our aid people in there to give those aids to those that were still alive. But as I showed you in the pictures, they were stacked up dead all over the place. And the living were like skeletons. But in the city of Nordhausen, our troops, not me, but our 104th Infantry Division, caught a German convoy, a train filled with Jews. They were leaving because they knew we were there. And they were leaving them to go to another camp, and go to a crematorium, or kill them or something. But at Nordhausen, all the people starved to death. And it was strange to see them, you know, nothing but bones and skin. And those living were barely walking around. And I remember seeing some of them, and they were French. And none of them—there weren’t any Jews at that time in the camp because they were migrating out.

And in the town, Nordhausen, there was all—I went in there to get all the men with shovels to come back to the camp and dig the graves for the dead. And they thought that I was going to have them come in and dig their own grave, and we would shoot them. But it turned out the other way. And we made them carry all of the bodies around to another hill, on the other side, and make them go through town, so the people knew that there was a concentration camp out there. [They had to carry the bodies through town] to get to this hill on the other side. Yeah, I know another serviceman said that they—in that town, they had forbid the citizens to wear gloves while they did it. They had to do it with their bare hands.

When somebody dies it comes back to me. And when this holocaust is going on now, in Africa and Syria and those places, I get memories of that picker thing because it’s just back here again, even though we didn’t want to see it happen again. But in Africa and in the Near East, it’s going on again today. And we had hoped when we freed those camps and we got rid of Hitler and freed Germany that we’d never see that again. But—

What does being a liberator mean to me?] Well, I think that it meant that we did something well, and accomplished a certain role. And not all of the Jews in Europe were cremated, there were some saved. There are Holocaust victims left here in the States, and also in the city here. [Being Jewish], I think it made a difference because I was part of them. And I had ancestors from there. And I had ancestors killed during the—and I don’t know how many others—than my father’s brother-in-law. I don’t know how many other people were killed. I’m grateful that I had par-ticipated in it. And I’ll always remember that I was part of it. And I was on the good part. And I just hope that I could do something about these things that are going on now, but it’s almost impos-sible at my age and in my condition to do anything about that, even though I’d like to. But, who knows? And I think that the main thing is that we should not forget. And that’s the one thing that I’ve been talking about at high schools and different schools. Most kids today don’t even remember World War II. And here was the annihilation of a complete race of people. And they’re trying to do it again, as I said, in Africa. Well, it just is impossible to think of it happening, even in Africa or the Near East, where somebody, like in Syria, can kill a thousand people, or in Africa, hundreds of thousands. It doesn’t seem possible in their minds that they could do this, but here it is.

[You] would never expect to see the things that we saw going through there, I mean, where the dead were just stacked up. And I had been seeing dead people before, and people got shot, but here they were just lying, and nothing but skin and bones. And they’d been lying there maybe for weeks, or even months. And—I don’t know, it’s something—a sight that I’ll never for-get. It’s implanted in my mind. And every time I look at those pictures, I could almost cry. And now the only good thing is I gave a speech one time, to a high school here in Dallas, about the Holocaust and Nordhausen. And a girl came up to me after the speech and said, “Thank you, Mr. Liberman.” I said, “Thank me for what?” “For you liberating the camp. You—” she said, “I wouldn’t be here now, if you hadn’t done that. My grandfather was there.”

So here it brought back—again, one of the men that we freed went on to have grandchildren here in Dallas, Texas. So that—you know, it makes you real sad. And of course, it was sixty-five years ago, but still, the memory of it is—is rough.

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