I begin with the words of a Jewish GI writing from Czechoslovakia in a letter home to New York, on May 8, 1945, V-E Day.
“We met five Jewish girls near here, the first Jews I have met since I arrived in the ETO [European Theater of Operations]. The Nazis had taken them from their homes in Hungary and put them in concentration camps. You can just imagine how these girls looked as they told us about the whole thing. Every time the Krauts would have to flee from a town, they would not leave the Jews behind but instead made them keep up with their retreat.
They told us that one day the Germans marched them 25 kilometers, many of them barefoot and all the Germans fed them the whole day were three potatoes. One little boy saw some beets in a field and ran out to pick some because he was starving. He didn’t get very far because the Germans shot him before he could get to the food.
They related so many things to us that to tell you all of them would require I write a book about it. One finds it hard to believe that humans could possibly live through something like that but a few managed to survive and were able to tell us these things.
The girls spoke beautiful Yiddish and were surprised to find American soldiers who could also speak the language and who were brought up in a religious atmosphere. After seeing these girls, believe me, all that has been said about the German dogs is not propaganda but true facts. Just hearing about these things is not enough. When you see it with your own eyes it makes a much greater impression on you. Oh yes, before I forget to mention it, we haven’t met any Jewish men yet wherever we’ve been.”
The story of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust
I am grateful to scholar Bernice Lerner for writing the story of many Hungarian Jews, especially her mother, in the Shoah. My father, Paul Cohen – the sergeant of a heavy machine gun squad in the American 97th Infantry Division in Germany and Bohemia in the last three weeks of the war in Europe – never wrote his book telling the story of the Jewish women from Hungary he met.
Lerner’s mother, born Rachel Genuth, lived much of the war in Hungary and was deported to a satellite concentration camp of Auschwitz and was forced on a death march, as the Germans retreated after heavy losses to Stalin. Her final stop until the war ended was the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
It was a horrifying end to the Nazi genocide and Lerner describes the reality of human skeletons marched from the death camps in Poland and the end of the war in all its horror. Her mother’s story as a girl is a harrowing one of survival and loss. That Rachel was able to build a life and family after the Shoah is remarkable.
BUT WHAT makes Lerner’s work unique is that she describes in All The Horrors of War (2020) not only the victims of the Nazi genocide but the toll the fighting took on the British soldiers as they moved toward the eventual liberation of Bergen-Belsen, on April 15, 1945. The author focuses on one British Officer in particular, Brigadier H.L. Glyn Hughes, a physician and hero of both World War I and World War II.
Lerner describes the battles the British and Hughes fought. Many of the British soldiers suffered from what could best be called shell shock. The fighting across Europe was intense. That was the horror of war even for those who were not targeted for extinction. The author, with great skill, succeeds in describing the battles across the continent.
But the worst experience for these soldiers was the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. They were shocked by the extreme overcrowding, mounds of corpses and starving inmates who were barely alive. The British doctor quickly brought in other physicians and nurses to treat many inmates who were dying, trying to save them.
As Lerner describes: “Different from anything they had experienced, the hospital center felt to the relief workers like another planet. One in which conventional ideas of tidiness, cleanliness and morality did not apply. It required the greatest mental effort... to maintain the right attitude. Nurses supervising the care of as many as 500 needed not only technical skills but also abundant human kindness. They encountered so many whose health had been completely destroyed and lay mute, helpless and dying. They encountered patients’ psychological state was difficult to understand. Some who were strong enough crept out at night to go for pilfering expeditions. One nurse found two live chickens under a patient’s pillow. Another found half of a calf under a bed.”
“Different from anything they had experienced, the hospital center felt to the relief workers like another planet. One in which conventional ideas of tidiness, cleanliness and morality did not apply. It required the greatest mental effort... to maintain the right attitude. Nurses supervising the care of as many as 500 needed not only technical skills but also abundant human kindness. They encountered so many whose health had been completely destroyed and lay mute, helpless and dying. They encountered patients’ psychological state was difficult to understand. Some who were strong enough crept out at night to go for pilfering expeditions. One nurse found two live chickens under a patient’s pillow. Another found half of a calf under a bed.”
Bernice Lerner
Rachel’s story of survival and Hughes’ heroism dominate All The Horrors of War but the last third of the study is the most effective. We have become injured by the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust. The sheer number of those who were murdered makes us numb.
Yet, Lerner reminds us of the horror, inhumanity and humanity that resulted from the liberation. Although many Jews died in the days after liberation, the survivors formed associations and there was a strong urge to make aliyah.
As for Hughes, he “regarded each survivor of Bergen-Belsen as one he personally saved.” He had great sympathy for the survivors and supported their attempts to make a life elsewhere. Hughes would marvel at the emergence of strong leaders from among those who had arrived in Bergen-Belsen just days before the liberation.
These young people had in their prewar lives experienced unity and a sense of purpose as members of various Zionist youth organizations. They spoke Hebrew, knew Hebrew songs and were full of hope. He attended reunions of Bergen-Belsen survivors. He even joined the Bergen-Belsen survivors for a gathering in Israel.
Finally, before he died of colon cancer in 1970, Hughes joined 300 survivors at Bergen-Belsen. At the event, Hughes said, “Not one of us who was not a prisoner there can ever realize what those brave people went through and endured.”
The writer is a rabbi, essayist and lecturer in West Palm Beach, Florida.