Kurt Landsberger said he “escaped” from his work at a POW camp by seeking refuge in the nearby town’s synagogue.
January 17, 2008
The subtitle of Kurt Landsberger’s new book contains more than a hint of the goal he had in mind when he had it self-published: Prisoners of War at Camp Trinidad, Colorado 1943-1946: Internment, Intimidation, Incompetence and Country Club Living.
The folksy memoir details how Landsberger, a Jew forced to leave Austria, worked while serving as a soldier in the United States Army as a translator at a prisoner-of-war camp.
“I wanted to show how incompetent, how unprepared the Americans were. For the first two years, we were making our own decisions; we were making our own rules,” said Landsberger in a telephone interview from his winter home in Delray Beach, Fla.
Landsberger, who would ultimately make his living from Bel-Art, the company he founded that makes laboratory products, is member of Temple Beth Ahm in Verona, where he is a longtime resident. He writes a weekly column in the Worrall newspapers delivered to many towns in Essex County.
Landsberger is also the author of Daring To Be Different: An Experiment in Busing Verona, New Jersey, 1968-1969, published by Sunflower University Press in 2000, and William Steinitz, Chess Champion: A Biography of the Bohemian Caesar, published by McFarland & Co. in 1993.
Camp Trinidad was one of 48 POW camps in Colorado from 1943 through 1946.
In Prisoners of War, Landsberger relies on personal accounts, newspaper articles, and government documents in relating that officers there were ineffective in maintaining order and control. He writes of German escapes and the sometimes harsh punishments doled out by the Americans, including shooting prisoners for appearing to be stealing wood. But mostly he writes how the prisoners were treated as equals or better in the camps, with access to plenty of food, German language books, musical instruments, and the like.
Highlights of the book include passages translated directly from prisoners’ diaries. Landsberger offers useful comparisons to the ways we now know American POWs were being treated in Germany.
In conversation with NJJN, Landsberger said the German prisoners treated him differently from the guards, whom they feared. “To me they talked, but not too much. They weren’t afraid of me because I didn’t have a gun. We never discussed current affairs, the war, or anything like that.”
He acknowledged that he disliked his work for two distinct reasons: boredom and his own background.
“I did the work. I didn’t find it exciting or fascinating or interesting. When you do work, either you feel you are doing a good job and you are contributing or it’s good for the country. There I felt I have to do the work. But I really was not interested in what these bastards were doing,” he said.
Nor could he forget the world he had come from. Born in Prague in 1920, Landsberger was raised in a secular family in Vienna. He left in 1938 and spent a year in London before coming to the United States in December 1939. He joined the U.S. Army in 1942, but a club foot kept him stateside and eventually led to his time at Camp Trinidad.
“The hardest thing was to…put on a friendly face, to talk to them, like ‘hello, how are you,’ when deep down I was always thinking, ‘Where were you and who are you and where the hell have you been?” he said, referring to events in Germany. “It wasn’t easy. I felt very badly.”
Landsberger would “escape” himself to the town’s synagogue, the first he had ever joined.
“I always left the camp as soon as possible and found refuge with my wife and at the temple in town. The temple became my second home.”
As at many rural synagogues in the United States, membership at Trinidad’s Temple Aaron had dwindled, but, Landsberger said, the presence of army officers helped reinvigorate the synagogue, which was built in 1889. “Our arrival, even though for only a few years, brought back life to this congregation. They did not have a wedding for years, and one of our couples was asked to remarry. They did not have sufficient members to stay after Friday services, but since we came from camp, stay we all did, and they brought in Jewish-type food from Denver for refreshments.”
He pointed out the inescapable contrast with his native land, where old synagogues were being destroyed during the war. Today Temple Aaron is the oldest synagogue in Colorado still in its original location.