Holocaust survivors salute the soldiers who gave them freedom

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Howard Cwick said he is “always in the wrong place at the wrong time,” and because of that, he became one of the first American soldiers to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp in April of 1945.

Some 60 years later, he was honored in Livingston on June 7 at a Salute to Liberators Luncheon sponsored by the Legacy of Light Society of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In a speech at the Crystal Plaza catering hall punctuated by emotional pauses and occasional tears, Cwick told an audience filled with survivors about what he described as “the most monumental day of my life,” surpassing even his wedding day and the births of his two children.

Cwick, who lived in Brooklyn before entering the military, had been ordered back to the headquarters of his unit, the Third Army’s 281st Combat Engineers Battalion.

“But I got into the wrong jeep, and we ended up in Buchenwald. My reaction was pure shock.”

As his jeep drove through two rows of electrified chain link fence, “we saw people inside wearing striped uniforms of some kind. Some people were lying on the ground. Some were walking around — not walking but shuffling around. I swear, a couple of them were looking right at us with no sign of recognition of any kind.”

In haunting tones, Cwick spoke of how he and fellow GIs entered the camp’s parade grounds.

“All over this field were bodies and bodies and bodies — most of them dead. Some were barely alive. You couldn’t tell who was and who wasn’t. In the background there were big wooden wagons like the kind you seen in the movies at a railroad station with the luggage stacked up on it. But these wagons didn’t have luggage. These wagons had bodies.”

As he moved around Buchenwald, Cwick said “the place was quiet. There wasn’t a sound. And as the GIs walked up toward these men they just stared at me with hollow black eyes. They just stared at me. And I was so choked up, I was crying from the minute I walked through those gates. I whispered to them, ‘Americaner, Americaner.’ No response. I grabbed one of them around his middle in a bear hug. I swear to you my rifle weighed almost as much as he did. His partner tried to pull him away from me. He put out his bony hand and was feeling the tears floating down my filthy face. And I screamed out loud, ‘Ich bin ein Jude. Ich bin ein Yid. I’m a Jew’ His friend turned around yelling, ‘Jude, Jude. Americaner.’”

Cwick paused at the podium for a moment, turned to his audience, and said, “Please forgive me.” He had begun to cry.

“They mobbed me and my partner,” he told the luncheon guests through tears. “They began touching me, my face, my hands. They began kissing my hands. One man lying on the ground — he couldn’t stand up — grabbed me around the leg and hugged it. I almost fell over. I couldn’t move. And one man near me had dropped to the ground and was screaming to the sky, ‘Tata. Tata. Papa. Papa.’ I guess we know what happened to his father.”

As he wandered through the camp “from one nightmare to another,” Cwick said he came upon another GI who “was kneeling in front of a pile of white stuff, and as I walked closer to him, it began to dawn in me what that white stuff was. I asked him ‘Is that what I think it is?’ and he said ‘Yeah.’ It was bones and ashes from the people inside. He handed one piece up to me. It was a bone with a knuckle on it. I would swear on a Bible I felt that cold piece of bone still burning in my hand. And as I fell to the ground crying uncontrollably, I looked at that pile and I wondered how many fathers, how many brothers, how many sons are in that pile?

“Was it 60 years ago?” he asked the audience rhetorically. “No,” he said, answering his own question. “Yesterday.”

The photographs he shot that day in Buchenwald have been part of the 287 lectures he has given in churches, schools, and synagogues since he returned from military service and began teaching photography at Long Island’s Uniondale High School. He is now retired and lives in Lake Worth, Fla.

The inmates’ perspective

Before she presented Cwick with a framed certificate for his role in the liberation, Bergen-Belsen survivor Eva Zysman told her audience stories about the liberation of the concentration camps from the inmates’ perspective.

She described her sister watching Nazi SS guards changing out of uniforms with shiny belt buckles that said, in German ‘God is with us’ and into civilian clothes.

She spoke of a female guard’s unusual behavior on the day of liberation.

“She was usually so brutal, and she always leered at them and chanted out these curses and, of course, used her black leather whip constantly, But this, time her voice was subdued and she said, ‘Children, be quiet. The Americans are coming.’

“And then,” said Zysman, the guard went into a warehouse wearing a black cape and booths and “came out a sweet little innocent peasant woman in a dirndl dress and the sisters knew for sure she would have no problem with the Americans outside of the camp.”

“In Dachau they saw soldiers,” said Zysman. “And who were soldiers? They were not German soldiers. They didn’t wear German uniforms. They didn’t speak German. They spoke a language the people didn’t understand. And another thing we had not seen before. Their faces were black. You see, in Poland, except for Josephine Baker or some circus performers, we had never seen Negroes before. So this was a real surprise.”

She said the American soldiers told the prisoners to lower the hands they had raised instinctively. “They said ‘no need to do that’” as they handed out GI rations of cigarettes, chocolate bars, and chewing gum.

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com.