The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust Read Online Free PDF Page B

the next several months, which included participation in the Battle of the Bulge. He earned a Purple Heart and screwed up his back for life as a result of the constant jumping down from the tank. By the time his unit stopped in Gotha, he was an experienced soldier, using training, innate smarts, and intuition to survive. But as most war veterans will tell you, it’s when you think you’ve got it figured out that you tend to get careless and take unnecessary risks.
    “I was now a tank commander, because our guys were getting killed, so they promoted me. Gave me three stripes. Baloney. I didn’t want those three stripes or any of them. Anyway, we’re on attack, on a paved road. I don’t remember what was on my right side, but on this side I see about eight, ten houses, well-kept two-story homes, and we stopped on the road. We gassed up, oiled up, and greased up and did what we had to, and we’re just waiting for a command to move out. So I said, ‘Hey, guys, I’m going into this house across the road.’ There was a wrought iron fence with fleur-de-lis all on this black fence, and I’m going in there to see what’s in the house, which is the most stupid thing I ever did. I go to the door, and I turn the handle, and the door opens. I go in, I look, and I’m in a big, big living room, and there’s a woman at the other end. She’s dressed from here”—he touches his neck—“down to her ankles, and she had a German honeycomb hair comb. And she says, ‘Come in, come in.’ Being I could speak Yiddish, I was used as a German interpreter, so I understood her. And I looked at her. All I had was my .45 and my grease gun, and I look around, and I see a door here and there, and it didn’t dawn on me until I ran out, what am I doing here? There might be enemy in there. My God, they can make mincemeat of me. Anyway, she says to me, ‘Come in, this is my living room.’ She asked me, ‘Keine Schokolade?’ And I said, ‘Nein.’ She says in German, ‘I’ll make a trade with you. See this lamp here, on the end table? You take this, you give me chocolate, and you can take this home as a souvenir.’ So, I said, ‘Nein, die Schokolade ist für die Kinder,’ because in every town we went to, little five-, six-, eight-year-old kids were not afraid of us, even in Germany. They used to come around to see us, look at us around our tanks. Very poorly fed, very poorly clothed. And the American soldier’s not a tough soldier, he’s a sweetheart, he’s a marshmallow, they see kids, they jump off the tank and give them chewing gum and if we had cookies, oh, these kids would love us. And we’d pick them up and just play with them. They would laugh. And, of course, this is when we’re not firing.
    “She said, ‘For a souvenir, take it home with you.’ So I looked at the lamp, and something shuddered over my body. I got a feeling, because the light was still on and I could see through there, and it was sort of grayish yellow coloring. She said, ‘Do you know what this is made of? This is human skin.’ That’s when I turned—I wheeled around and just waved her down and ran out, and the guys said, ‘Hey, what happened?’ I said, ‘I just did the most stupid thing that I ever did. What the hell did I go in there for?’”
    It would not be the last time that American troops were confronted by such hideous creations.
    Probably around the time that Harry Feinberg was recovering from his Gotha adventure, Lieutenant Colonel Al Irzyk’s 8th Tank Battalion was literally flagged over to the side of a main Gotha road by the commanding officer of Combat Command A, Colonel Hayden Sears, a huge hulk of a man who dwarfed the much more diminutive battalion commander.
    Speaking face-to-face on the sidewalk, Sears told Irzyk that intelligence had received indications that the Nazis had built a huge underground communications installation designed for the headquarters of the entire German army in the event Berlin had to be evacuated.