What was Liberation?

During World War II, Jews who lived in Germany or in countries that had been occupied
by Germany were imprisoned in labor camps, concentration camps, and death camps.
They were liberated from these camps by Soviet, British and American soldiers in 1944
and

1945.

The first concentration camp to be liberated was Majdanek. The prisoners in Majdanek
were liberated by Soviet troops in July 1944. Soon thereafter Soviet troops found other
Nazi camps, and freed their inmates. British and American troops reached Nazi camps
in

the

spring

of

1945,

liberating

tens

of

thousands

of

prisoners.

These prisoners had been living under extremely harsh conditions. Many were starving
and others were very sick. Many of the people who had been liberated had survived
"death marches," forced to march over long distances. The death marches occurred
towards the end of the war as the Allies advanced on the German army and the Nazis
tried to move prisoners further west into Germany. The German leadership believed that
the Third Reich would survive the war. They therefore attempted to move concentration
camp prisoners within Germany's borders, so that they could still be exploited for slave
labor. Upon enteringAuschwitz-Birkenau, Soviet soldiers found only 7,650 prisoners.
Most of the 58,000 remaining camp prisoners had been sent on death marches at the
end of 1944. Prisoners were abused and sometimes killed by the guards accompanying
them on these marches. Approximately 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died on
death

marches.

Other than survivors of the camps, some of those liberated had been hidden during the
war or had masqueraded as Christians with false identity papers. Still others were
surviving ghetto fighters, partisans and those who had fled to the forests.

Colonel Lewis Weinstein, a member of the US Army, liberated Jews who were in Nazi
camps.

He

recalls:

" We had heard all kinds of rumors and stories, but they were so horrible that they
were indescribable; we just couldn't believe them. I had a great guilt feeling when I
actually found out about what happened in these camps. I had talked in terms of
possibly a few thousand having been murdered, but thinking in terms of six million...
murdered - I was obviously very much taken aback." [1]
Father Edward P. Doyle, a chaplain in the US Army during WWII, participated in the
liberation

of

Nordhausen.

He

recalls:

"I was there. I was present. I saw the sights. I will never forget. You have heard the story
many times before. On the night of April 11, 1945, my division, of which I was the
Catholic chaplain, took the town of Nordhausen. The following morning, with the dawn,
we discovered a concentration camp. Immediately the call went out for all medical
personnel that could be spared, to be present. [] On that morning in Nordhausen, I
knew why I was there. I found the reason for it - man's inhumanity to man. What has
happened to that beautiful commandment of the Decalogue, the commandment of God
to love one another?"[2]
Eva Goldberg was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Horneburg camps, and was
liberated

at

Salzwedel,

Germany,

by

American

soldiers.

She

recalls:

"And what I remember most is the convoys of Americans who were standing on both
sides of the road and looking at us. They did not believe what they were looking at!" [3]

What Did Liberation Mean for Jewish Survivors?

Liberation should have been a happy day for the survivors. Finally they were free of the
constant fear of death they had lived with for so many years. For the Jewish survivors,

however, liberation had come too late. Entire communities in Eastern Europe,
especially, had been wiped out and all their Jews exterminated. Over 90% of the Jewish
community

in

Poland,

the

largest

in

Europe,

had

perished. [4]

In Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Balkan States, the outcome was nearly the
same. The Jews of Western and Southern Europe also suffered terribly, though the
proportion of those exterminated was lower. In many cases, whole families had been
slaughtered, and only single members were left. A survey taken by the Organization for
Jewish Refugees in Italy, for example, found that 76% of the Jewish refugees had lost
all of their immediate families and all of their relatives, and were the sole survivors from
their families.[5]
More than anything else, however, with liberation the survivors were struck suddenly by
the immensity of their losses. Up until liberation, survivors had expended all their efforts
on the struggle to survive: they scavenged for food, they tried to protect themselves,
they lived from minute to minute. This struggle to survive didnt leave room to focus on
the world they had lost: their family and friends, their occupations and habits, their
neighborhoods and their possessions. Suddenly they were confronted with a new
reality. Their families were gone, and their lives would never be the same. An almost
superhuman effort was needed to pick up the pieces of their broken lives and to start
over again. While the rest of the world was counting the dead, the Jews were counting
the living.
Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman, a member of the underground who fought, among other
battles,

in

the

Warsaw

Ghetto

Uprising,

testified:

That day, 17 January, was the saddest day of my life. I wanted to cry, not from joy but
from grief. [..] How could we be happy? I was completely broken! You'd kept yourself
going all the terrible and bitter years, and now... we were overcome by weakness. Now

we could suddenly allow ourselves to be weak [..] Ultimately there is an end to war. We
had lived all that time with a certain sense of mission, but now? It was over! What for?
What for? [..] I had never cried; they had never seen me depressed, not once; I had to
live strongly, but on 17 January its not easy to be the last of the Mohicans."

[6]

Yosef Govrin was born in 1930 in Romania. He was deported to various ghettos and
camps in Transnistria. Yosef was liberated by Soviet soldiers in December 1944. He
recalls:
"The devastation caused by the war and the fact that I was an orphan came to me very
forcefully on Victory Day. I saw the destruction that the war had wrought much more
realistically, I suppose, than I had before. The destruction had been all around me day
and night, but only on Victory Day did I notice it on the street where I was walkingIt
was then, as a boy, that I grasped the full scale of the destructionand really, Victory
Day is engraved in my memory to this day as a day ofnot as a day of celebration!" [7]
Eva Braun was born in 1927 in Slovakia. During WWII she was imprisoned in
Auschwitz-Birkenau,

and

liberated

by

US

soldiers.

Eva

recalls:

"You were praying all those months to be liberated and then it hits you all of a sudden here you are free. But after it sank in, the freedom - I am speaking for myself - I realized
that I was hoping the whole time that I would see my father and maybe, hope beyond
hope, my mother, although I knew that this was not a realistic hope. But my father, I was
sure I would meet him. I was positive. But still there were doubts, and I realized that I
had to start thinking about the fact of what would happen if I would not... Freedom is
relative. Very much so. The thought of the future weighed very heavily on me. Obviously
we knew that it was no longer our problem but still we have to make a future for
ourselves and how would we make that future?" [8]

Miriam Steiner testified: "[..] The great crisis had not yet hit us. It began when my cousin
came home a few days later. I barely recognized him, because that kid, that big slob,
had two big ears, a big nose and two cavities for eyes. He began to recover from his
"Musselman" condition. For the first time I cried, I fell on him and I cried at how he
looked, because then I suddenly woke up. He was the start of my crisis, of the crisis of
ours as a whole... He embraced me and said only this: "You should know one thing,
don't wait for your father and your brother." He repeated that many times [..] "Now we
began to realize the enormity of the loss, we began to understand that Grandfather and
Grandmother and hardly any of our relatives had returned, only that one cousin, and his
father also returned later on. People said we shouldn't wait for them, but the truth is that
we waited all the time for my father. And I only want to say that I often look around, as
though I am still searching... not for Father, it is my brother for whom I am still looking all
the time. I know it is completely unrealistic, because formally I am not searching, I.. I
cast about with my eyes..."[9]
The Allied soldiers cared for the survivors they had liberated. They fed the survivors and
gave them the medical attention that they so desperately needed.
Ephraim Poremba was born in Poland. Ephraim was deported to several Nazi camps,
and he was liberated by the US Army at the age of twenty. He recalls:
"The Americans organized a hospital, they started doing tests, they set up tents with
water and showers. We washed, they gave us soap. When did I last wash? I couldn't
rememberFirst of all hot water; whoever saw hot water? It was a dream. As much hot
water as you want, to wash with soap, with soap! You could even wash your head, your
body, it was heaven, it was heaven on earth!" [10]