The Liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, April 11, 1945

On April 11, 1945, American troops liberated Buchnewald Concentration Camp.  It was a large camp housing about 80,000 prisoners, Poles, Slovenians, Frenchmen, Africans, and others.  They were brought there to work in the factories that the Germans built in and around the camp. 

We have a lot of documentation and photos from this liberation because the great American journalist and photographer Margaret Bourke-White was with the US Army when they liberated this camp.  She took photographs that captured the suffering of the men who were in the camp.

Here’s one of her photos.

My father was a prisoner in this camp for four years.  He was just a Polish farm boy, and he was captured when he went into his village to buy a piece of rope one Saturday.  The Germans had surrounded the village and were rounding up men and boys to go to Buchenwald and work in the factories there.

A lot of times when we think of Concentration Camps we imagine the death camps the Germans built in Poland where the primary business was killing large numbers of civilians.  Buchenwald wasn’t a death camp.  Millions did not die there, burned in the ovens, their ashes scattered in ponds where the water is still gray 70 years later.  But they did die there.  About one out four people died each year. 

What did they die of in Buchenwald?

Mainly starvation.  Fifty years later, my dad could still remember the hunger he felt.  He did hard labor 6 and even 7 days a week, 12 and 14 hour days, on a handful of food a day.  I’ve read accounts of what the men ate.  It came to about 600 calories a day. How much is that?  A Big Mac with Cheese is about 700 calories.  A Big Mac without cheese is 600.  But what my dad ate wasn’t a Big Mac.

I asked my dad once how he was able to stay alive.  He shrugged and said he didn’t know.  He said that most of the time the guards gave them a kind of gray gruel made out of some kind of grain and animal bones.  My dad called it “Hitler’s secret weapon.”  It wasn’t enough to keep a man alive, so my dad was always looking for things to stick into his mouth: twigs, pieces of paper, bits of cloth, leather buttons.  Once when he complained about the food, a guard hit him across his head with a club.  He knocked my dad down to the ground, but my dad got up and begged for food.  It was the wrong thing to say.  The guard clubbed my dad unconscious.  When my dad awoke, he was blind in one eye. 

But men didn’t only die of hunger.  People died for simple infractions, annoying the guards by urinating out of turn, slouching in line, standing in the wrong place. 

They died of cruelty too.  My father told me a story about one cold January night when the 400 men in his barracks were called out into the square for a roll call.  The men were dressed in rags, torn pants and shirts.  Some had shoes, others didn’t.  They had almost no protection from the snow and wind.  The guards lined them up in rows and told them they had to check the roster of prisoners, and then the Germans started reading the long lists of names.  As the guards read, men started dropping into the snow, falling to their knees and then keeling over.  And the guards kept reading.  They read through the roster once and then they said, “Oops, we missed a name,” and then they read through the roster again and again and again for six hours while men fell to their knees and died in the snow.  The next morning garbage carts came and collected the dead and took them to the ovens.  

Others died from overwork, hangings, experiments, crucifixions.  One of my father’s friends, an artist from Wilno, was first castrated and then hanged. 

One in every four died like this.  A lot of Margaret Bourke-White’s photos are of the dead, in piles like worthless paper, like rubbish.

But there are also many pictures of those who survived.

And when I look at the photos Margaret Bourke-White took the day the camp was liberated, I look for the face of my dad.  Thin as a shoelace, blind in one eye, with a scar across his skull where the guard beat him and beat him and beat him.  I haven’t found my dad yet, but I know I’ll recognize him when I see him.  

In the Spring the War Ended

For a long time the war was not in the camps.

My father worked in the fields and listened

to the wind moving the grain, or a guard

shouting a command far off, or a man dying.

But in the fall, my father heard the rumbling

whisper of American planes, so high, like

angels, cutting through the sky, a thunder

even God in Heaven would have to listen to.

At last, one spring day he knew the war was there.

In the door of the barracks stood a soldier,

an American, short like a boy and frightened,

and my father marveled at the miracle of his youth

and took his hands and embraced him and told him

he loved him and his mother and father,

and he would pray for all his children

and even forgive him the sin of taking so long.

__________________________________________

The photo above was taken by Margaret Bourke-White.

If you want to know more about my dad and his experiences in the war, you can get a copy of my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues, available at Amazon.  Echoes contains the chapbook Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, about my dad's experiences in that camp.

Easter Poem

My father wasn't an educated man.  He was born on a small farm in western Poland and never attended school.  He used to joke that the German concentration camp he spent 4 years in was his college and university.

He didn't know much about stuff most of us take for granted.  One of the things he didn't know much about was religion.  You couldn't talk to him about things like Moses or the Garden of Eden or the Holy Trinity, even though he was born a Catholic.

But he had a strong faith, and there were things that he believed with a certainty as sure as the turning of the earth.   This is a poem about that.

What My Father Believed 

He didn’t know about the Rock of Ages

or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob’s ladder

or gathering at the beautiful river 

that flows beneath the throne of God.

He’d never heard of the Baltimore Catechism

either, and didn’t know the purpose of life 

was to love and honor and serve God.

He‘d been to the village church as a boy 

in Poland, and knew he was Catholic

because his mother and father were buried 

in a cemetery under wooden crosses. 

His sister Catherine was buried there too. 

The day their mother died Catherine took 

to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,

and cried.  She wouldn’t eat or drink, just cried

until she died there, died of a broken heart.

She was three or four years old, he was five.

What he knew about the nature of God 

and religion came from the sermons

the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up

with his own life.  He knew living was hard, 

and that even children are meant to suffer.  

Sometimes, when he was drinking he’d ask,

“Didn’t God send his own son here to suffer?”

My father believed we are here to lift logs

that can’t be lifted, to hammer steel nails

so bent they crack when we hit them.

In the slave labor camps in Germany,

He’d seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should

help each other.  If you see someone 

on a cross, his weight pulling him down 

and breaking his muscles, you should try 

to lift him, even if only for a minute,

even though you know lifting won’t save him.

_____________________________

The poem is taken from my book about my dad and my mom and their experiences in WWII, Echoes of Tattered Tongues, available from Amazon.

The illustration at the top of the page is by the artist Voytek Luka from my book Third Winter of War: Buchenwald.

Winter Dreams -- Buchenwald Concentration Camp, 1944

By the winter of 1944, my father had been in Buchenwald for 3 years. 

He thought the war would never end and he would die there, some cold winter morning. I wrote a long sequence of poems about that winter. The sequence is called "Third Winter of War: Buchenwald" and it's in my book Lightning and Ashes.  

Here is one of the poems from that sequence: It's about the nightmares my dad had in the camp. They continued until the day he died 53 years later. Theywere always with him.

XVIII.

He dreams again his hands are cut
to pieces. He dreams he is falling.
He dreams he is an old woman
eating the fingers of a young boy
who died when his horse reared
up crazily and crushed him.

He dreams he swims in a river
he can’t escape. It is the blood
of the devil, thick and dark
and like acid to the tongue.

He dreams of eating human flesh,
of women copulating with corpses,
of dogs licking his fingers,
of soldiers spreading manure
around the red and white roses
beside the church in his village.

He dreams he swims in a river
he can’t escape. It is the blood
of the devil, thick and dark
and like acid to the tongue.

_____________________

The statement on the gate at Buchenwald reads "Jedem Das Seine."  It is German for "To Each His Own."

My Parents and Happy Places

Recently, SGI Quarterly, a Buddhist magazine devoted to Peace, Culture, and Education, asked me to write a piece about my mom and dad and what they -- as concentration camp survivors -- were like as parents for a special issue of the magazine devoted to parents and children.

 

At first, it was hard to think of my parents as parenting role models. My mom and dad had gone through years of slave labor in Nazi Germany's camps, and the experience left them with traumas they never were able to shake. In one of my new poems called "The Evil that Men Do," I write half jokingly about how as a kid I sometimes thought that my mother had learned her parenting skills from Nazi guards.

I didn't think I could write the article. But then I did. Here's the article:

My father was a man plagued by nightmares about the Nazi concentration camps he and my mother both spent years in. When I was a child, his screams would wake us all. I don't think I've ever heard screams like that. They were muffled in an odd way. Screams, in my experience, are usually accompanied by an explosion of air. My father's nightmare screams were drawn in. Even in his sleep, it was almost like he was afraid to scream. I would come to my father's bedroom, and he would be asleep and screaming and struggling with the Nazi guards who were beating him. He drank all the time to keep these nightmares back.

My mother's experiences in the camps showed themselves in a different way. She was afraid of so many things, loud noises, whistling, even clowns she saw on TV; and she was especially afraid of things being done incorrectly. She would beat and scold all of us, even my father, if the table was set the wrong way for dinner or if we came home late after an outing. My sister and I often thought that our parents were crazy; our lives amid the screaming and fear and anger just didn't make sense.

But despite all of this, I now realize that my parents wanted so hard to give us happiness. And when I think about my childhood, I think about the happy times my parents tried to give us, and I think about the special places where these happy times took place.

For me, the most important of these moments took place on the June day I turned four years old, a Sunday in 1952, when I ran to the garden in the back of a little house we were renting in Chicago and stood there among Black-eyed Susans with their yellow petals and long, thin necks. And my mother in a white dress with little blue flowers sat in the garden between me and my sister, and my father stood in front of us with a Brownie Cadet box camera.

He was asking us to smile in the Polish we still spoke at home, while my mother told me about the day ahead, how we would go to Kiddie Land, an elaborate children's playground, and my sister Danusha and I would ride on the blue and yellow and red cars and the roller coaster built just for kids. My mother made it sound like there was something special about being a kid the way she talked about the day we had planned.

It makes a picture I don't want to forget.

I think we all have such special perfect places, happy places where we feel most ourselves, most comfortable. Maybe we remember these special places and special times and turn to them because they were the places and times our parents were happy, before their lives took their inevitable turns. Maybe not. Like most of us, I'm not good at figuring out the complex why of things.

But I remember that particular Sunday morning when I was four, and you remember sitting at a baseball game between your mother and father, and both are yelling at one of the players in a way that frightens you just a little but you know is okay; or you remember a day when your parents took you swimming and your mother was laughing at your father because he was wearing her bathing cap pulled down over his eyes in a silly way; or you remember your father sitting at the piano with a cigarette between his lips, playing some slow, sad piece you loved so much while, in another room, watching and listening, your mother stood washing some dinner plates or ironing some clothes.

_____________________
To see the entire issue of SGI devoted to Parents and Children just click here.