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Pearl Harbor Survivors Project
THE TENNESSEAN October 29, 2003 Holocaust Soldiers Recall
Capture, Liberation By ANITA WADHWANI Staff Writer 4 were among 350
Americans sent to camp because they 'seemed' Jewish
On a cold German morning shortly before the end of World War II, a
19-year-old Tennessee soldier named Wallace Carden stood before Nazi officers as
they issued the command:
''Jewish soldiers, one step forward.''
None of the 4,000 U.S. soldiers captured in the Battle of the Bulge
moved, so the Nazis decided to pick out the soldiers who ''seemed'' Jewish and
send them to a forced labor camp.Carden was among those picked.
Three hundred and fifty soldiers were loaded onto boxcars and
sent on a journey without food or water to the Berga camp in northern
Germany. More than 70 were Jewish. Most, like
Carden, were not. Four of the survivors of the Berga
concentration camp - now all in their late 70s - stood yesterday on a Vanderbilt
University stage and spoke to an audience of teenagers not much younger than
they were when captured. The event was part of the Tennessee
Holocaust Commission's continuing educational programs aimed at high school
teachers and their students. About 300 attended yesterday's speech.
Carden enlisted from Briceville, Tenn., a coal-mining town northeast
of Oak Ridge. When he first entered basic training and was sent to the 28th
Infantry, he weighed about 190 pounds, he guesses.Liberated by
U.S. soldiers after two months in Berga, he weighed 90
pounds.He remembers liberation like this: ''A
lieutenant came up and pointed at me and said, 'What the hell is that?' '' The
man was pointing in shock at Carden's emaciated body.He and
other men were too weak to pick up the rations offered by U.S. soldiers.
More than 70 men died in the camp or in the forced march in
spring 1945 as Allied troops neared.Berga was part of an
extended Nazi system of concentration camps that included forced labor camps,
where many people were worked to death. The men worked side by
side with Jewish detainees and political prisoners blasting tunnels to create a
synthetic fuel factory as part of the Nazi war effort. At night
they slept two to a bunk, three bunks to the ceiling in unheated barracks
infested with lice. There was so little food that the imprisoned U.S. soldiers
invented an elaborate system called ''bread-cutting squads'' for dividing up the
single loaf of bread meant to feed a half-dozen men a day.
''The guy who cut the bread that day got the last slice,'' said
Bill Shapiro, a medic captured with the 28th Infantry Division who spoke to
students yesterday. ''That way, the slices were divided very evenly.''
Shapiro, now a retired doctor living in Palm Beach, Fla., was
among the Jewish soldiers sent to Berga. Soon after his
surrender, he was interrogated by Nazi captors in a way typical of the Battle of
the Bulge prisoners, he said. They asked for not only his name, rank and serial
number, but also for his mother's maiden name and his father's profession in an
effort to determine whether he was Jewish. His dog tags, with the tell-tale
''H'' signifying ''Hebrew,'' were hidden in his shoes.''The
interrogator shouted, 'You're Jewish!' '' Shapiro said.''Not to
my credit, I answered, 'No,' '' Shapiro said. He was sent to Berga
anyway.
The other Berga survivors speaking yesterday were Tony Acevedo, a
California native of Mexican descent who is not Jewish and was captured with the
70th Infantry Division; and Gerry Daub, a Brooklyn native who is Jewish and was
assigned to the 100th Infantry Division.The story of the U.S.
soldiers in the Berga camp was a little-known part of Holocaust history until
filmmaker Charles Guggenheim made the documentary Berga: Soldiers of Another
War, which aired on PBS in May.Guggenheim spent the last six
months of his life making the film to honor fellow comrades in the 106th
Infantry who died in Berga. The filmmaker had been away from his regiment
recovering from an infection when they were captured. Carden says he is
gratified for the film and the effort to keep the story
alive.''Nobody was interested in it for a long time,'' he said.
But for all these years Carden has kept a shadowbox on his
living room wall with reminders from that grim time.
Along with his prisoner of war medals, the box displays gifts from
his fellow prisoners: the rough-hewn wooden spoon he used to eat rotten soup,
and a pocketknife he used to cut bread made from sawdust. Submitted By Angela
Meadows Kingsport Times
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