Sixty-five years ago, tank driver Joe Vanacore was part of the 4th Armored Division's push east into Nazi Germany. In early April, he was aiming the bulldozer blade of his 30-ton Sherman tank at the gate of a barbed-wire enclosure his battalion had discovered.
He rammed through, and later described what he could make out through the periscope from inside his tank:
"The first thing I saw was this big pile of bodies, about five, six foot high, like a haystack. I didn't realize they were bodies — my mind didn't tell me they were bodies until I got a little closer."
Vanacore's memories of Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald system, are detailed in Michael Hirsh's new book "The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust." Ohrdruf was a small camp, but significant, says Hirsch. He writes: "It was the first one discovered by American forces that contained the bodies of hundreds of dead prisoners as well as starved, frail concentration camp inmates who had managed to survive until the liberators arrived."
Russian forces had found death camps in Poland the previous year, but it was only in April 1945 that American GIs would begin to witness the horrors. Ohrdruf would be the first of many camps liberated by Americans.
Once outside his tank, it was not only what he saw that stayed with Vanacore.
"The smell got me so bad I couldn't eat for a week," he said. As Hirsh writes, "It's what stays in his mind, what he thinks of now when he hears people say 'the Holocaust was a fake. I really couldn't stand people to say things like that. We were right there; we saw things with our own eyes.' "
Like emaciated bodies scattered throughout the camp's grounds and barracks. Like piles of bodies — the phrase "stacked like cordwood" is used over and over in the book. Like swimming-pool size trenches filled with bodies.
And those are the victims the Nazis couldn't hide. Ben Storch, a Pole whose units fought alongside the Russians, described the Majdanek death camp he entered in July 1944:
"It was terrible. You had the ovens, you had the bones, and you go over to the side and you have this huge mountain of ash. … I said Kaddish. The gentile guys knelt on the floor and prayed. On that big pile of ash, that's where we said our prayers. Yeah, the tears came to my eyes."
Even more astonishing among such horrors was that there could even be any survivors. Here's Gerald Myers on his arrival at Buchenwald:
"(T)he people were standing, holding on to the fence, and they could see you, but they were looking right straight through you. They just were so malnutritioned that they could hardly stand up, and they were nothing but skin and bones. … You couldn't believe that people that were so skinny could still stand up, but they did."
Totally unprepared for what they would find in the death camps, the GIs acted on instinct, emptying their packs and pockets of anything edible. But such rich food was too much for starving people, and some actually died of being fed. As more camps were found, soldiers were ordered not to feed the survivors, to wait for medical personnel to arrive — it would prove a difficult order to obey.
Also hard to quell were the emotions stirred by the camps. There was little sympathy for guards or collaborators who fell into the hands of the survivors.
Leonard E. Herzmark remembers nearing Buchenwald: "As we drove up the road, I saw a lot of stuff hanging from trees … My eyesight wasn't the best — I wear glasses. But as we got closer, I saw those were soldiers, German soldiers … A mass lynching, for which you cannot blame anyone. The Germans had asked for it."
At the same camp, Milt Silva watched inmates beating a captured guard. Though now ashamed of his behavior, he told Hirsh, "I remember standing there shouting, 'Kill the sonofab—!'"
Most of the veterans and survivors interviewed for "The Liberators" are now in their 80s and 90s. And while many stayed silent for years about what they saw in the death camps in the closing days of World War II, they are still haunted by the images.
Harry Feinberg's nightmares worsened after his retirement and he pleaded with his doctor, "I want to forget about this; I want a pill that's going to soften everything." The reply: "There's no such pill, and you will never forget about it."
Never forget is the message that these vets and survivors carry to schools, churches and synagogues and others. When asked to speak, survivor Sidney Glucksman says, "I drop everything, and I make a date, and I go. Because I always say that I'm alive because God wanted me to be alive so I should be able to tell the story about it."
Hirsh's "The Liberators" helps Glucksman and others carry on that important work.
Kevin Ferris is assistant editor of the Editorial Page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. E-mail: kf@phillynews.com. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.