- [Narrator] Winter and spring, 1945.
(somber music)
As Allied troops advanced across Europe toward Germany,
they encountered Nazi concentration camps
and liberated thousands of prisoners.
In the camps, combat-hardened soldiers witnessed firsthand
the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi regime
and its so-called policies of racial superiority.
They found piles of unburied corpses
and barracks filled with dead and dying prisoners.
The small percentage of inmates who survived
often required immediate assistance after months and years
of maltreatment, starvation, and forced labor
at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.
US Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower
made a deliberate visit to the Ohrdruf concentration camp
in order to witness personally
the evidence of Nazi atrocities.
He urged others to see the camps directly,
lest the stories of Nazi brutality be forgotten
or dismissed as merely propaganda.
The weeks and months following liberation
did not bring an immediate return to normal life.
Survivors struggled to restore their health,
regain their dignity, and rebuild lives
disrupted and destroyed during the Holocaust.
65 years after the end of World War II,
we honor and remember the victims of the Holocaust
and the military personnel
who liberated and cared for the survivors.
- I ran in that direction and as I came onto that place,
I noticed many prisoners
yelling and screaming and jumping and dancing.
And there standing amongst them
were seven giants.
Young people.
They must have been 18 or 19.
American soldiers.
There were seven or eight of them standing inside the camp.
Apparently they cut the wire and came into the camp.
They were bewildered by us.
Wild and unkempt and dirty
and I'm sure smelly people, jumping and dancing
and trying to embrace them and kiss them.
And I did too.
I also joined the crowd and yelled and screamed.
And somehow knew that the day of liberation has come.
It was a strange feeling for me however,
because as I remembered,
on the one hand I was overwhelmed
by this unexpected and unhoped for
encounter for freedom.
But at the same time, what was happening was outside of me.
I really...
I didn't know what to make of it.
I knew I was free, but I didn't count on it.
I somehow didn't know what it meant.
And I knew it was great, but I was overjoyed
because all people around me were overjoyed
and were singing and dancing.
But I was 17.
I was free, but what it meant, I wasn't sure.
- From there we go into the barracks.
They were long,
almost like a poultry building
that we might see down in Missouri.
Perhaps 100 feet long and maybe 25 feet wide.
But as we went into this first barracks,
we were overrun almost
by about 25 or 30 of these inmates,
who came and hugged us
and tried to show us the gratitude they had
for us being there liberating them.
Actually, we did not liberate them.
It was the infantry units themselves
that liberated these people.
But anyway,
they were so overwhelmed with emotion
that they tried every way they could
to show us appreciation.
But I remember this young man, his name was...
We called him Bud.
He and I both had some caramels
and I had some K-ration biscuits,
and we started to distribute them among these soldiers,
or rather these camp inmates.
And the net result was we almost started a riot
because they fought like animals
trying to get anything that looked like food.
And this man and I have discussed that since then
and we have never encountered
such atmosphere of complete
desolation of mankind.
- They were so thin. I couldn't pick any of them up.
I tried to, but if I'd go to pick them up,
I'd tear the skin,
so had to be very, very careful moving them out.
The skin was just so terrible.
So it'd take, oh, about at least three people.
One person take the head, one person take the legs,
and very carefully lift them up and get them outside.
Wanted to get 'em outside of that place.
We put up tents outside.
We had cots and clean bedding, so we'd take them out there.
Or if there was a hospital nearby,
we'd go and take over that hospital and move them in there.
But we couldn't, for typhus, that was the main thing.
There was no medication.
It was just supportive treatment and get fluids down 'em.
Well, they couldn't drink anything
so we had to feed 'em with medicine droppers.
And we couldn't give 'em hypos
because there was no place to stick 'em.
There was no skin at all, just...
Or no muscle, just skin and bone.
There was no place to give 'em a hypo.
- I want you to know that when the war ended,
I weighed the equivalent of probably what is 70 pounds.
And I was skin and bone.
And I do remember that when that British soldier came,
and asked me, he said can he do something for me.
And I said to him I'd like two things.
I'd like to bring me warm socks.
We're talking this was already May, it was warm.
I was cold.
I wanted warm socks, knee-length socks,
and I wanted sugar.
So he brought me...
I was craving sugar, I suppose.
He brought me socks.
And I do remember two things.
I remember when I put on the socks,
and I started to cry because I didn't have any calf.
I was all bones and the knee-length socks wouldn't stay on.
But I also remember that when he gave me the sugar,
it may not have been more than maybe a quarter of a pound,
maybe, a little bag of sugar,
but it was maybe, as I say, sugar, just plain sugar,
I took the bag and just poured it into my mouth.
I just ate it like that.
And I remember it because he got scared
and he ran out looking for the nurses.
Because he thought God knows what I did to myself
by eating all this sugar.
And I remember the nurse said to him in German
that it's okay, I was probably just craving sugar.
- My very clear
view of freedom and liberation came that morning
when I stood in this doorway of that abandoned factory,
and I saw a car coming down the hill.
And the reality of that came
when I saw the white star on its hood and not the swastika.
And there were two men in that car.
One jumped out.
- I saw some skeletal figures
trying to get some water from a hand pump.
But over on the other side,
leaning against the wall,
next to the entrance of the building, I saw a girl standing,
and I decided to go walk up to her.
- I remember that aura of...
Of that awe, of the disbelief in daylight
to really see someone who fought for our freedom.
For my ideals.
And he looked like a god to me.
- And I asked her in German and in English
whether she spoke either language,
and she answered me in German.
- And I knew what I had to say.
And I said to him, "We are Jewish, you know."
For a very long time, at least to me it seemed very long,
he didn't answer me.
And then his own voice betrayed his emotion.
He was wearing dark glasses, I couldn't see his eyes.
He said, "So am I."
- I asked about her companions.
- He said, "May I see the other ladies?"
A form of address we hadn't heard for six years.
I told him that most of the girls were inside,
they were too ill to walk.
And he said to me, "Won't you come with me?"
I didn't know what he meant.
So he held the door open for me and let me precede him.
And that was the moment
of restoration of humanity,
of humaneness, dignity, of freedom.
- We went inside the factory.
It was an indescribable scene.
There were women scattered over the floor
on scraps of straw.
Some of them quite obviously
with a mark of death on their faces.
- I took him to see my friends.
- The girl who was my guide made sort of a sweeping gesture
over this scene of devastation,
and said the following words:
"Noble be man, merciful and good."
And I could hardly believe
that she was able to summon a poem
by the German poet Goethe,
which was called, is called,
"The Divine," at such a moment.
And there was nothing that she could've said
that would've underscored the grim irony of the situation
better than what she did.
- And this first young American from liberation day
is now my husband.
He opened not only the door for me,
but the door to my life and my future.
- And on this day in April in 1945,
with some of my comrades I walked through the gates
of a place called Buchenwald.
I was totally unprepared for what I saw.
For someone of 19,
they couldn't be prepared, they haven't lived long enough.
I was still trying to develop my value system,
I was still trying to sort things out,
and then all of a sudden, slap, right in the face,
was the horror perpetrated by man against man.
But nevertheless, the story must be told.
We must talk about the crematoriums
and we must talk about the dead.
We must talk about the denigration of human personalities,
how they tried to make people less than human.
And the purposes are beyond me.
It boggles the mind for me to try to figure out why.
Why would someone take millions of people
and in a planned, organized, systematic way
try to destroy them, exterminate them?
I have yet to come to grips with that in my own mind.
But I know that I must share this
so that the history books really tell the story as it is.
That nobody sugarcoats the history as they did with slavery
and make you think that all slaves loved the plantation
when it's not true.
We cannot, even though the revisionists are out there today
writing books and telling students that it never happened,
we cannot ignore our responsibilities to tell the story.
Yes, we must be graphic.
We must use the media.
We must come together like this
to focus attention across the world.
But in the final analysis, my friends,
if we want to avoid another Holocaust,
if we want to make sure that this doesn't happen again,
then we have a personal responsibility
to do something about it.