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April 15, 1945
Buchenwald, Germany
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Nothing in the world could have prepared me for Buchenwald.
Human skeletons wearing black-and-white-striped pajamas, eyes much too large in their gaunt faces, stared with little expression as the journalists recorded this atrocity against humanity. I heard they had cheered when troops from the Sixth Armored arrived, throwing their rescuers into the air. By the time I entered with other press colleagues, the harsh reality had been revealed. Even though their tormentors had run off, men were still dying. Their bodies, so far depleted of any nutrition or overrun with Typhoid fever, couldn't battle any longer. I had no idea a human form could survive such conditions.
The spring sun shone bright and warm on my shoulders, its vividness in direct contrast to the blackness of horror before us. Never will I forget the stink, a combination of unwashed bodies, bitter sickness, and rotting flesh that permeated the surrounding air. I wasn’t the only one to lose my breakfast, and I’ll admit it took more courage to remain and observe the camp than it did to live inside the colonel’s home. My senses were overwhelmed. Having the camera was almost a relief. The lens diffused the ghastliness and distanced me from the devastation it filmed.
Citizens from the closest town of Weimar had been rousted early from their homes and marched, escorted by American soldiers, five miles to Buchenwald Camp. Patton, Eisenhower, and Bradley commanded the civilians witness the atrocities the Nazis had committed in their backyard. Prisoners guided them through the camp, pointing out the vileness like docents at a museum. Patton himself oversaw the Buchenwald procession and called for more press to come record the barbarism. Typhus had run rampant through the camp, and though the press and army were sprayed and given pills, Patton took no precautions to protect the civilian population from the disease.
Twenty-one thousand prisoners were housed here, and the morbidity rate was estimated to be one hundred a day—in the winter as high as nine hundred a day. I photographed a wagonload of emaciated bodies piled in preparation to be burned in the crematorium, left there like an unimportant pile of rubbish rather than children of God. Women, dressed in their Sunday best, became physically ill or turned their heads aside in shame. I understood why. Mortification that anyone could inflict this type of suffering upon another human being, much less the tens of thousands, weighed heavily on my heart.
A group of Jewish survivors placed themselves at a table in front of the barracks, a squat building with hard wooden slats, stacked three high, to be used for beds and no stove for warming the room. Still wearing their striped uniforms, they confronted civilians who walked past. A dark-haired man jumped out of his chair and ranted as loudly as his weakened lungs would allow, with finger pointed, at half a dozen men and women who turned their heads aside in shame.
“Do you understand what he’s saying?” a frowning soldier asked as I reloaded another roll of film.
“He’s telling them they did this to the Jews. They are Nazi swine. He holds them as responsible as the SS. He says they are all murderers and their town should be burned to the ground.”
The man spoke more eloquently than my translation, and I pitied the soldier’s inability to understand the language. The former prisoner finally ran out of breath, and his colleagues helped him back into his seat. One of the women in the group that had been harangued sobbed quietly into her handkerchief.
“Ich wusste davon nichts.” I didn’t know. It became a regular refrain heard from the civilians as they toured the camp.
Soldiers looked on with disgust and disbelief.
But I knew.
I knew they knew something wasn’t right with the camps. Hitler had done his best to hide the depravity from the general population. But even in Oberndorf, workers had been escorted through the town to the factory under guard. A kind person who was caught offering them food could find himself beaten in the street or hauled off by the SS. I remember one distressing incident when Dagobert laughed and pointed at one of the poor souls digging in the trash for food. I ached to smack him and probably would have had there not been an SS officer watching and grinning at the child’s cruelty. Rumors had run rampant through intelligence divisions about the concentration camps, but unless you were standing here, looking at the destruction, you couldn’t imagine the real truth.
By the afternoon, my stomach had turned into a greasy lump of distress, and I worked my way over to the commandant’s office, a two-story, dark wooden edifice. The air was slightly less putrid over here, and I let myself into the building. Sunlight shafted into the room from the open door to reveal two soldiers at a large mahogany desk piled with ledgers. A safe to my right stood open, its heavy door hanging crookedly by a single hinge. The men squinted at me as I entered. The door shut behind me and I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the murkiness.
“Who are you?” a lieutenant asked.
His name tag came into focus and read Wentworth. “Press.” I held up the camera. “I was directed to take some photographs. What have you got there?”
“Records of the poor bastards who came through.”
The sergeant to his left grunted. “You’ve got to give the Krauts credit, they sure do know how to maintain good documentation.”
“Yes, they’re sticklers for the paperwork,” I murmured as I set up a shot of the two soldiers. The sergeant shifted and I read his name tag, Lowenfeldt.
“Well, it’s enough to hang this old bastard, Pister, for war crimes,” Lowenfeldt replied, his features drawn and a look in his eye that made me glad I wasn’t Hermann Pister, the commandant of Buchenwald.
“If he makes it to trial,” Wentworth muttered. “Prisoners are scouring the countryside for SS guards as we speak.”
“And finding them. I saw a pair shoot one by the side of the road this morning.” The sergeant flipped through one of the black ledgers.
“Will the military allow the ... vigilante justice to continue? Will the men not stand for trial?”
Lowenfeldt glared at me, his jaw set and brows crunched together. “You think it’s wrong? That these men shouldn’t get their revenge? You think it’s okay what the Krauts did to them? The POWs, the Poles, the Jews? You know this isn’t the first camp we’ve found. Are you some sort of Nazi sympathizer?” He stuck his chest out and laid a hand on his M1 sitting on the desk.
“Lowenfeldt.” Wentworth laid a hand on the sergeant’s arm.
It took all my willpower to remain calm after his unfair attack, and my answer came out in a low voice that, to my displeasure, held a slight tremor. “No, of course not. There is nothing acceptable with the horror story that is Buchenwald. I think ... public trials can reach much further into the collective psyche of a nation ... and the world, for that matter, than the instant gratification of shooting a monster on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. I would hope some of the top Nazis are caught alive and held up as an example of the depravity of Hitler’s rantings. The world will watch while they hang.”
My hand had fisted so tightly my fingernails bit into the flesh on my palm. “But it is not up to me, and I can certainly understand why the prisoners are pursuing their tormentors.” Lars, bleeding out on the floor, rose to mind. Would I have allowed Glassman and Tank to arrest him with the rest of the German POWs that day? “Trust me, Staff Sergeant, I understand far better than you realize.”
Lowenfeldt’s posture relaxed as I spoke, and he released the weapon. “Well, you might have a point. But it’s not as though we can do much to stop them. They’ve already lived in the worst prison man ever erected.”
“I suppose not.” Twisting the lens, I brought the safe into focus, the shutter clicked, and in the flare of light, something caught my eye. I went over to investigate. The corner of a black frame jutted up from behind the safe. It must have fallen off the wall and gotten jammed in there. My efforts to remove it were futile.
“Has anyone a knife?” I asked.
“What did you find?” The sergeant removed his knife, flipped the blade into his hand, and offered me the handle.
“I’m not sure.” I jimmied the metal between the wall and the safe and worked the frame free of the crack. The sound of broken glass tinkled onto the floor as it came loose, and I took it over to the window.
“The Fuhrer and Commandant Pister taken March 1944.” I translated the caption for Lowenfeldt, who’d followed me to the window to peer over my shoulder at the photograph of Adolf Hitler, Hermann Pister, and eighteen other SS officers standing tall and proud. Behind them rose the gates of Buchenwald, identifiable by the words within the metalwork “Jedem Das Seine,” which, translated literally, means “to each his own.” However, in the English vernacular, it would be closer to the meaning “everyone gets what he deserves.” An appalling sentiment considering the conditions we’d just found. I’d photographed a line of civilians entering through those gates earlier in the day.
It took every ounce of control not to deface the picture with the knife I still held. Instead, I turned it over. The brown paper backing showed no further inscription, but on a hunch, I dug my nails through and pulled it aside. Sure enough, on the back of the photograph, listed by order of rank, every man’s name in the photo.
“I’ll be damned,” Lowenfeldt breathed.
“I believe there is a Chinese proverb about a picture being worth ten thousand words.”
Wentworth joined us and let out a low whistle between his teeth. “This should make identification easy. It looks like they’ve created their own police lineup. The captain is going to want to see this.”
“Indeed.” I passed the picture into his hands.
“What did you mean?” Lowenfeldt asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said you understood more than most.”
I fiddled with my camera. “It’s not something I can talk about.”
“I apologize for calling you a Nazi sympathizer. It’s just ... this place ...” A golden Star of David hung around his neck, its chain intertwined with his dog tags.
My gaze raked the room, taking in the stacks of paperwork. “You realize this is what the war is really about. Not just the maneuvering to depose an insane dictator but to put an end to the murder of innocent civilians whose only crime was to be considered undesirable to their own countrymen. This is why the generals invited all the press outlets to come here. We are witnesses. You, me, him.” I pointed at each of us. “We are here to make sure this never again happens in human history.”
My little speech silenced the two men.
I returned behind the camera, taking photos of the office and ledgers, half-empty drawers of filing cabinets, and papers strewn across the floor. One of the ledgers lay at my feet. I crouched down, flipping it open to a random page. Rows and rows of numbers with names, birthdates, and deaths lined the columns. All terminated here in this camp. The page I flipped to had an entire column listing the same date under death for each person. More pages revealed the same, and my finger ran down random names that meant nothing to me ... until one did—Friederich Dantzig, violinist from Berlin, Religion—Jewish. The birth year was three years prior to mine and the date under death was listed as January 17, 1945. I sucked in a breath and my knees thunked to the hardwood floor.
Poor Camilla. What would I tell her? Should I tell her?
Of course, I knew would have to write to Camilla so she could stop wondering. It’s what I would want if something happened to Charlie. It would be better for her to find out from a friend, but I hated to be the one to snuff out that candle of hope she held on to.
Who else did I know who might be listed on one of the ledgers? My girlhood friends, Sacha? Elijah? Was Magda’s name on a list here, or another camp?
The appalling thoughts washed over me unbidden and unwanted. I dropped the ledger and stumbled out the door into the bright sunlight.
