Victims, survivors honored International Holocaust Remembrance Day

ABINGDON, Va. – As a young soldier, Emanuel Grossman was among the first Americans into the Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II. The nightmare he lived as he helped to liberate death camp survivors would play over in his head for the next 65 years.

Harry Greenbaum, who lives outside Washington, D.C., is a survivor of one of those camps, liberated by U.S. soldiers in Germany near the end of the war.

“There came this tank, and it was an American soldier, and he said, ‘You are free,’” Greenbaum said. “That meant a whole lot to us. That man gave us back our freedom; that man gave us back our life.”

As the world today recognizes International Holocaust Remembrance Day, more and more are listening and recording the first-hand accounts provided by people like Grossman, who died Jan. 10, and Greenbaum, who believes he must tell his story.

During the Holocaust, 6 million Jews and millions of others were systematically murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Yet many lived to tell their stories.

Arthur Berger, spokesman for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said the first-hand accounts are important, especially in the Internet age when misinformation is easily spread. Those memories must be documented as much as possible, Berger said, in the hope that, by preserving the truth about what happened, future atrocities can be prevented.

“There are a lot of lessons to be learned,” Berger said.

In Nazi Germany, he said, all of society’s major institutions failed; the police, the judges, the health, educational and cultural institutions all collaborated with a dictatorship bent on mass-murder.

Stopping hatred

Greenbaum was imprisoned in three different camps before he was liberated. And that finally occurred in the middle of the woods after a forced death march through the countryside. His German guards abandoned him and the other prisoners, running to save their own skins as U.S. troops arrived.

Until that moment, Greenbaum said, he was sure no one would ever find them.

Greenbaum’s story covers living in the ghetto in his native Poland, the loss of his mother, his sisters and other family members, and how he survived the three death camps.

“They should speak out whenever they see injustice done to someone,” he said of other survivors and the message he hopes to impart. “Maybe somebody … will stop there from being so much hatred in this world.”

Just a soldier

Grossman was a U.S. Army soldier chosen as a translator because he spoke both German and Yiddish. Those skills brought him to Dachau, to translate the words of the prisoners as the camps were liberated.

“He would just go, ‘The smell, the smell, I’ll never forget the smell,’ from the burning flesh in the air,” said Grossman’s daughter, Elissa Peters, a schoolteacher in Queens, N.Y. “He’d tell the same parts again and again, and he couldn’t give anymore detail. He just got so broken up, it was like he just couldn’t cross that threshold, it was so painful.”

Peters said her father avoided speaking about his experience until he was very old, but those who knew him in his later years heard bits and pieces, and the choking rattle of emotion that took over his voice as his mind struggled to put the words together.

In those years – the last of which Grossman spent in Southwest Virginia – he nurtured a deep understanding of the need for God’s love in the world, his family said, and a deep fear that society would someday forget what he could not.

He never could get over the fact that what he saw was not the war to end all wars, Peters said. But he took one key lesson from his experience, she said: “Love and tolerance of each other.”

dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701