Exhibit Highlights American Witnesses of the Holocaust

Photo By Bernard Little | By April 1945, 17-year-old Lucjan Salzman had spent three years imprisoned in 10 different Nazi concentration camps across Europe. He was liberated in May 1945 from the Wobbelin camp in Germany by the 82nd Airborne Division.  

UNITED STATES

04.27.2022

Story by Bernard Little 

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

American Witnesses, An Interactive Exhibition, is now on display at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in observance of Holocaust Days of Remembrance, April 24 through May 6. The exhibit comes from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
The exhibit, in the Arrowhead Zone of Building 9 first floor, allows people to see and hear what soldiers and Holocaust survivors witnessed in the spring of 1945 following the liberation of German concentration camps.
The U.S. Congress established Days of Remembrance as the nation’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust. The Days of Remembrance include Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Hebrew, called Yom HaShoah, this year observed from sunset April 27 through nightfall April 28.
In 1943, Anthony Acevedo entered the U. S. Army and trained as a medic. In January 1945, he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp. A few weeks later, the German camp leaders selected 350 American soldiers, including Acevedo, and deported them to the Nazi concentration camp Berga-am-Elster. On April 9, 1945, German camp guards forcibly evacuated Acevedo and other prisoners of Berga because of the approaching allied armies. After marching for 15 days, a 150-mile death march, during which fewer than half of the Berga prisoners survived, Acevedo and his fellow prisoners were liberated by the 11th Armored Division. He weighed only 87 pounds.
Army Sgt. Leon Bass, of the 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion, also saw the tragedies as a result of the German concentration camps. He was 20 years old in April 1945 and worked reconnaissance when he entered the Buchenwald concentration camp days after its liberation. “As I walked through the gates, I saw walking dead people. They were just skin and bones…filled with sores. I said to myself, ‘Who are these people? What were their crimes?’ It’s hard for me to understand why anybody could have been treated this way.”
Sgt. William A. Scott III, 22, was in the same outfit as Bass and served as the unit’s photographer. They arrived with the second wave of Americans to reach the Buchenwald concentration camp, and Scott was tasked with documenting what he saw. He recalled thinking when his unit first arrived at the camp, “It’s not as bad as people say it is; it’s just like a regular prison.” But as members of the unit drove around the camp, Scott said he began to see people who were in terrible shape, and soon realized it was worse than what he had been told. “There was no way you could describe it. I was told by some of the survivors that over 30,000 people had been killed within a two-week period, and the Germans were trying to kill all those in the camp before we got there.”
Army Lt. Beatrice Wachter also saw firsthand the horrors of the concentration camps. She was 37 when she joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, and in April 1945, she was assigned to the 51st Field Hospital when members of her unit entered the Nordhausen concentration camp. She wrote a letter to her husband describing what she witnessed. The letter was later printed in her local newspaper. An excerpt from her letters states, “I’ve seen the most horrible sites that I hope I will never see again as long as I live.” She described what she saw as “human wreckage, living skeletons, diseased, infested with lice and maggots, skin and bones. Boys, 13, 14 and 15 years old who looked 60 and 70 years old, with hallowed eyes, sunken cheeks, sores all over the bodies. It isn’t human. Bodies are all over, headless, no arms, burnt to a crisp.
“Little children, some babies, a few women, but mostly men. I’m working in a ward with 60 of these men and the stories they tell. They were allowed three potatoes and a cup of soup each day. If too weak to work, they weren’t fed at all; 30 to 50 of them died each day. They were tied to stakes and beaten. I saw the stakes. They were machine gunned until their bodies were scattered all over the field in pieces. We saw hands and legs, and parts of brain lying all over. It was horrible. I see the rows of bodies, some naked, some with a few clothes on, in front of me now.”
Another Army nurse, Lt. Marie Knowles Elifritz, 22, was deployed as part of the 130th Evacuation Hospital to the newly-liberated Mauthausen concentration camp to aid the survivors. “My initial feelings were of a tremendous job to do,” she recalled. “To take in 1,500 patients in a 400-bed hospital…was a tremendous, overwhelming job. Clinically, it was a matter of sorting the dead from the living, deciding who would live for at least three days or more, and to make all those we found comfortable, and begin the process of treatment.” She explained this included “keeping the patients try, providing them with an air mattress to give them a place to lie down, a blanket to keep them warm, pajamas to give them some dignity, a small amount of food to nourish them, and plasma to preserve the remaining life and begin them on the road back to the living.”
Those who survived their ordeal in the concentration camps described the elation they felt upon seeing their liberators.
In the spring of 1942, Lucjan Salzman and his family were forced into one of the ghettos in German-occupied Poland. For the next three years, he was imprisoned in 10 different Nazi concentration camps across Europe.
In 1945, the 17-year-old Salzman was transported with other prisoners to the Wobbelin camp in Germany, where he was eventually liberated by the 82nd Airborne Division. “I noticed many prisoners yelling, screaming, jumping and dancing. There standing among them were seven or eight giants…young men, they must have been 18 or 19, American soldiers,” Salzman said.
“They were bewildered by us…wild, unkempt, dirty and smelly people singing, dancing and trying to kiss them,” Salzman said. “I joined the crowd and yelled and screamed. I knew the day of liberation had come. It was a strange feeling for me. I didn’t know what to make of it. I knew I was free, but didn’t know what it meant. I was overjoyed because all of the people around me were overjoyed, but what it meant [to be free], I did not know. I was 17,” he added.
Gina Rappaport, also a Holocaust survivor, expressed similar sentiments. She was liberated in April 13, 1945 after two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. “It was the luckiest day of my life,” she stated about her liberation. “I was also sad this day because I remember how many people had died and couldn’t see the liberation and the fall of the barbarian Hitler. I shall never forget what I owe the American Army.”
The annual Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust (DRVH) period normally begins on the Sunday before the Israeli observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, and continues through the following Sunday.

• Date Taken: 04.27.2022
• Date Posted: 04.27.2022 12:53
• Story ID: 419440
• Location: US