David Cohen - 1945: Choices

We were in Toule, France. T-O-U-L-E. And there was someone there that was persecuted, a Jew, by the Nazis. I met him. He showed me, there was a synagogue, a little synagogue, in Toule, France. And I went in there, and I remember going through there. The Germans had used it to store their ammunition. And they threw all the Bibles around, you know. They didn't care, of course. And I took a Bible. I was gonna take it and bring it to my mother as a souvenir, you know. We always looked for souvenirs. And I remember walking down the street, and I thought, this Jewish guy...if any of the Jews come back, they're gonna need this Bible more than my mother. I remember walking back and putting it back in the...in the little synagogue. It's funny how you remember these things. They stand out in your mind.

We went through Germany and it was April...5th. We got a radio message that there was a communication center that had to be taken. And they said we had an Infantry Battalion in our armored division, part of it. And they went and they radioed back that it wasn't a communication center, but a concentration camp. And this was in a place called Ohrdruf, Ohrdruf, Germany, outside of Gotha, G-O-T-H-A. And they said to send all the medi...medics, all the doctors, the nurses. We had a field hospital attached to the division. They sent all the medics there. Well, we went in and, you know, about an hour or so later, and when we got to the camp, there were about sixty bodies, and you'll see the pictures I gave you...pictures [garbled]...sixty, about sixty bodies just strewn all over the place. They were either shot in the back or clubbed to death. They were people that would survive. And what the Germans did, they loaded a couple trucks that they had with the survivors and they took'em to another camp. They didn't want them to be liberated even...even at the end.

There was a memorandum from General Eisenhower, that he wanted all available troops to see the concentration camp, to see why we were fighting. When we got there, naturally, you know, take a, a half...a few days off, a few hours off from the radio. We went in there, and we were walking around. We saw General Eisenhower came in with General Bradley and a few other officers. And he went into this room and he got sick. He came out, and he said he can't understand killing children. He says, the senseless thing, he says, can you think of one of these young people that were killed could've been a scientist that found a cure for cancer. I remember him saying that.

When we went to the camp and Patton came in, and he went in and saw the bodies piled up, and he came out and he threw up, this macho general. And he got up on his jeep, and I want to tell you what he said. He said...he starts screaming at the top of his voice. Now mind you, Generals Eisenhower and General Bradley were standing there. And he gets up and he says, see what these son-of-a-bitches did? See what these bastards did? He says, I don't want you to take a f'n prisoner, he yells to us. You know, ...would violate all the Geneva Convention, but uh, that's the way he felt. And you know, I can say one thing. There was never any of the soldiers that went into the camp will ever deny that the Holocaust happened, you know.

The smell was so horrible. In fact, we had the...this Colonel Sears made the mayor and the people of Ohrdruf come and see the camp. And the mayor comes up to him and says, well I didn't know what was going on. So Colonel Sears says, you're a lying son-of-a-bitch. He says, the smell alone will tell you what was go...it was awful. I can't describe the smell. It was so penetrating, horrible.

In fact, it was April 12th. I remember I was on the radio. We got a...we heard that President Roosevelt died, and then we were right outside of Buchenwald, near Weimar, Germany, where the constitution was formed. And we went into the camp. The Sixth Armored Division was there before us. And we went into the camp and we saw thousands...this was a major camp. There were maybe fifty, sixty thousand survivors there. In fact, that's where Elie Weisel was when we got there. I never met him, but he was in one of the barracks. And uh, I took pictures there with my friend. We went into the...into the rooms were the bodies were staying.

Q: When you left...when you left the camps...Are you s...are you saying you went...you just continued working?

Yeah, we went...yeah, we just left, but we were all stunned. And, 'course, you're angry, and, you know...you want to...you feel like you want to kill everybody...on the other side.

Q: So, what do you do with that?

Nothing. We just went, uh...some of the guys...there were stories of uh, the 45th Infantry Division, they were in Dachau, and one of them, I don't know what, if he was Jewish or not, but he took...we never found any of the prisoners...any of the guards. They all ran. But at Dachau, they caught so many of them. And this one soldier lined them up on a wall where they used to execute the...

Q: An Allied soldier?

Yeah, oh yeah, an American. And he lined them up, and he machine gunned them. And an officer came and just...not...you're not supposed to do it, of course. And he knocked the gun...I remember reading about it. I didn't, you know, know it or see it. But, uh, we had cases where there was one of the fellas...in fact, he was a hillbilly from one of the...down South. He would capture a couple German soldiers, and he'd say, okay, you can escape. Run! And when they ran, he shot'em. But there're, you know, all kind of atrocities, you know, you read about this...this stuff now in Iraq. I can feel for those soldiers. You know, it's not right what they do. But you lose some of your humanity. I guess that's why Rob...Rob Wilson has his boys go around, to tell what war is like. You know, you lose...you feel like you want to kill everybody or do it, and if you see one of your buddies killed...like, one of my best friends, Ernie Ruggierio was killed. We picked him up three days later. He was starting to turn black, you know? And, I cried. I remember I cried like my own family. And, uh, you get bitter. You want to kill everyone that was on the other side.

Q: How long does that feeling stay with you?

Oh it goes...it passes. Thank God, it...not with me, it didn't last long. Just like now, when I get mad at someone, it goes by fast.

There was an incident in Czechoslovakia where the...the Czechs...am I over? [referring to the time]...the Czechs, uh, picked up three SS soldiers from the woods. And, um, one of them was a school teacher, and his father wanted to know if he was killed or tortured by them. And, when he got them, they beat up the three Nazis, and we watched it. And we...it was...they were our prisoners, not the Czechs'. And I should have taken them and brought them to, you know, POW camp. But I sat there...I stood there and I actually enjoyed watching these people...they dropped rocks on their heads. They kicked them, you know? And I actually enjoyed...and I went back to the barracks that night, and one of the radio operators, Lefkowitz, I said, Lefty, I said, you know, I'm sick. I stood there and I actually hated. It got the best of me. I says, I'm never gonna use the word "hate" again. I remember what it did. It...it...it...I couldn't sleep, it upset me so much, that I was so, you know, angry, that I lost my humanity, you might say.