Got A Penny?

We stopped for a couple days in the area of Landsberg. Somebody told us there was a concentration camp up there. We went up, and the scene was devastating. All we could do was look at each other with our mouths open. We couldn't believe what we were seeing. It was bad. Hundreds of prisoners in black-and-white-striped uniforms. They were like skeletons. They could barely stand. There were piles of burned bodies all over the camp. The odor made us all sick. A couple guys were puking, some were crying. This camp didn't have ovens and gas chambers. Their death was to be starved and burned and buried alive in mass graves. How the hell they endured that I'll never know. I grew up with Jewish kids. I thought of them when I seen this— the Jewish people at home, and how lucky they were to live in America. Eddie Stein, he was my assistant machine gunner and my friend, he broke down next to me. He said: "Babe, can you believe what man can do to man?" He said: "They're my people." I said: "Ed, I know." He had me crying. None of us had any idea. Ralph hollered: "Come over here." We walked a few feet away from the camp, and there was an abandoned train. You could smell it before you got to it. The smell was overwhelming, sickening. Ralph slid the train door open and the inside it was stacked full of dead bodies. I said: "Why the hell did you have to show me that." It was a sight I'll never get out of my head. We knew it was all Jews from the concentration camp. If any of the guys didn't know why we were fighting the war, they knew then. We had to wait for someone to come up and delouse the camp before they could open the metal gates and let us make body contact with them. The gates were locked. Before we got there, the Germans found out we were coming, locked them, and ran away. Eddie kept saying, “I’d like to kill those bastards." Eddie wasn't the kind of guy to look for a fight. There was a young Hungarian Jewish girl, she had her hands on the bars and she was looking through at us. She was crying and kept saying: “You are my heroes, my angels! My God, we're free, we're free at last!” She was beautiful. She had naturally curly red hair down to her shoulders. About nineteen years old. She should have looked fifty with what she’d been through. I couldn't stop looking at her. I said to one of the guys: “Boy, she's shayna." (Yiddish for “beautiful”) A Polish slave-laborer from a nearby farm heard me, and he looked at me and said: "Shayna, huh?" I said: "Yes, a beautiful girl.” He said: “She was the German officers' favorite." Oh, boy, that hit me. The German officers' favorite. It got me sick. And Eddie, too, he started crying more. I thought to myself, imagine if that was your own sister, or your daughter? I can see her clearly today. She didn't have the striped garb the other prisoners had. She had women's clothes. She got treated differently. That young girl really affected me, I never forgot her. If anyone ever tells you the Holocaust didn't happen, or that it wasn't as bad as they say: no, it was worse than they say. What we saw, what these Germans did, it was worse than you can possibly imagine. It burns me up when I think about it, because lots of countries knew about it and let it happen. Jewish people tried to escape by boat, thirty-five-hundred of them, and they were turned away from every country they went to, even the United States, and ended up back in Germany and were killed. Everyone in America, their families immigrated here so they could have better lives. It wasn't fair. Edward "Babe" Heffron - Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends, ch. 8