May

5

Seventy Years Later, I Still Remember….

The scene of the liberation, as an inmate in the concentration camp of Mauthausen, Germany on May 5th, 1945

"It was early afternoon, and lying on the topmost bunk, I saw through a tiny window, on the top of the hill, grim buildings of the camp administration surrounding the Appellplatz, the square where prisoners were counted before going to work. For days now there was only deep silence there: no more labor troops. The Appellplatz seemed totally deserted.

"Suddenly, on the winding road a jeep appeared, followed by an armored car with a soldier at the machine gun mounted on it. They moved very, very slowly, cautiously uphill. The buildings on top were separated by a steel barrier from the rest of the camp. Today it was not the usual SS guard; the soldiers wore a different uniform. The two strange-looking vehicles reached the barrier. They stopped, and for a while the two sides eyed each other. Then the German guard raised the barrier without any resistance. Just as slowly as they came, the vanguard moved forward and stopped again in the middle of the square. Two giant-looking American soldiers got out.

"A minute later, the eerie silence was shattered by an earthquakelike rumble. Humanlike shapes, clad in striped prison pajamas, crawled forth from nowhere, moving grotesquely, seemingly senseless, stumbling, falling, and getting up again, trying to approach the Americans. All the while, they were shouting and screaming inarticulately; the sounds emitted were hardly human. They threw themselves at the Americans, who stood there in shock and disbelief, taking in the apocalyptic scene. Tripping over each other, they kissed their hands, their feet, their uniforms, wherever they could touch them. Many crawled around the vehicles convulsively, in hysterics.

"If man ever cried out from the depths, here was the nadir. These were the victims of the great German empire. All the enslaved, humiliated, down-trodden people of Europe.

"This moment remains indelibly set in your memory. Very few lived through such a scene and survived to bear witness. This is an experience during which you know, right when it happens, that the rest of your life can produce nothing like it. And perhaps time ought to come to a stop here.

For a brief moment it seemed that justice prevailed after all: the innocent is set free, and the evil is punished.

"Lying on the bunk, all that crossed my mind. But I didn't cry. I had run out of tears long ago."


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  1. Peter on May 6, 2015 1:24 am

    Writing with the ignorance of a younger generation,
    I have not run out of tears.

    Thank you for posting this (today).

    Warm greetings from Dresden
    Peter

    http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/36337

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