The Liberator: GI wants no one to forget Hersbruck’s stacks of bodies, skeletal survivors
By MICHAEL E. YOUNG / The Dallas Morning News
Dallas Morning News , TX
April 18 2005
10:02 PM CDT on Sunday, April 17, 2005
The men of Company K skirted a small Bavarian town and crept down
a country road in April 1945, on their way to engage the retreating
German army in the last weeks of World War II.
A few hundred yards away, a set of gates opened quickly, and two
trucks gathered speed as perhaps 10 German soldiers scrambled aboard.
The Americans, most with just a few months of battle experience,
inched toward the gates, afraid of what they’d discover inside.
What they found was far beyond anything they’d imagined.”We walked
in,” said Leo Serian, “and we froze at the sight before us. There
were bodies strewn all over the ground.”
Mr. Serian, now 79 and living in North Dallas, remembers thinking of
a stormy winter day, with tree limbs scattered across the yard.
But then he looked to the right and saw a pyre of bodies stacked
eight to 10 feet high. And he realized the enormity of the cruelty
and terror they’d found in this concentration camp called Hersbruck.
“We were paralyzed there. We couldn’t move for a few minutes,” Mr.
Serian said. “Most American soldiers knew nothing of concentration
camps. And we’d walked into one.”
Finally, they looked beyond the horrors and saw movements, painful
and halting, as the camp’s few survivors struggled to greet their
liberators.
Three weeks earlier, on Easter Sunday, April 1, thousands of prisoners
filled the camp. But with American troops approaching, those well
enough to walk were forced to march to Dachau. Only 9,000 would
survive. And of those left behind, just these few remained alive
three weeks later.
“Some were still able to walk. Some came on their hands and knees,”
Mr. Serian said. “And they crawled to us and held onto us, thanking
us, I guess, in their own languages.
“You could almost see the bones protruding from their bodies.”
All the survivors seemed near starvation, Mr. Serian said, but the
soldiers, part of the 261st Regiment of the 65th Infantry Division
in Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army, carried only K rations, and not
much of that.
The troops remained with the survivors for an hour or so, said Mr.
Serian, then a private first class, until other units caught up that
could supply needed help.
Then the soldiers of Company K resumed their push toward the German
lines, across Germany and into Austria, to VE Day on May 8 and home
to America and the lives they’d left behind.
Writing to survivors
The years slipped past, eroding many memories of the war, but the
image of what he and his buddies found in that concentration camp
remained fresh, Mr. Serian said.
“It was always on my mind,” he said, “and I thought for years of
trying to locate the survivors.”
He’d learned the name of the prison, a satellite of the huge
concentration camp at Flossenburg, but knew little more than that. In
January 2004, he turned to the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C., explaining what his unit had done almost
60 years earlier and asking for guidance.
In return, he received a list of 27 survivors and their addresses. He
wrote letters to each one, telling who he was and the role he’d played
and asking about their experiences at the camp and their lives since.
He’s heard from more than a dozen, some in the United States and
others in Bolivia, Israel, Germany, the Czech Republic and Italy.
‘Responsibility to tell’
Why launch such an effort after so many years?
As a first-generation Armenian-American, who lost his grandparents
and most of his relatives in the massacres of Armenians in the late
19th and early 20th centuries, Mr. Serian empathized with the Nazis’
victims.
But mostly, he was angry with those who denied the Holocaust had
occurred.
“A lot of memories from the war have faded,” he said, “but one thing
I know is we liberated a concentration camp, and I want the people
who deny it happened to know that.
“And I felt a responsibility to tell people about it for the sake of
those who never came back.”
In the history of the Holocaust, Hersbruck plays a minor role,
one of thousands of subcamps lost amid the horrors of Auschwitz,
Treblinka, Mauthausen.
But the memory of that pyre, and the tugs of thankful hands at the
brink of salvation, convince Mr. Serian that even this small story
is worth remembering.
“I keep thinking these poor souls went into that camp through the
gates of death,” he said, “but they came out through gates of freedom.”