Friday, September 8, 2000
Houston, Texas
Volume 66, Issue 14
University of Houston
Concentration camp liberators honored at Holocaust Museum
Between 300 and 400 people filled the Holocaust Museum Houston to hear stories from three veterans who liberated Nazi concentration camps
By Ken Fountain
Daily Cougar Staff
In recent years, public interest in the Holocaust has increased on many levels, from feature films like Schindler's List and Life Is Beautiful to the opening of museums dedicated to the subject around the world, including one in Houston.
Most documentary or fictional depictions of the tragedy focus on the victims, or the survivors, of the Nazi horror. But one group that has received little attention in the history of the Holocaust are the Allied soldiers who liberated the death camps in the waning days of the European war.
Houstonians of all ages moved to rectify that oversight Tuesday night as they gathered at the Holocaust Museum Houston to honor veterans of the 4th Armored Division who liberated the Ohrdruf and Buchenwald concentration camps in April 1945.
Between 300 and 400 people filled the museum's main gallery and overflowed into a second auditorium to hear the remarks of three veterans of the 4th Armored, a tank division that was credited with "breaking the back" of the German army in Belgium during the notorious Battle of the Bulge before pushing into Germany and facing the terrible discovery of the camps.
Rice University sociology professor William Martin set the scene for the audience before the veterans' remarks. He related how the 4th Armored was "feared and hated" by Germany's front-line troops, and how General George Patton said the division's accomplishments had "never been excelled in the entire history of warfare."
Martin said when he was asked to participate in the program, he "readily accepted, for the same reason you are here. I wanted to be in the company of men who had been eyewitnesses, and early testifiers, to one of the most stunning and horrifying episodes in all of human history."
Harry Feinberg, a tank driver in the 4th, described an incident just before the unit discovered Ohrdruf when he met a German woman who asked him for some chocolate. She offered to give him a souvenir in return -- a lamp with a shade made of human skin.
"I was not the same person after that," Feinberg said.
Robert Pearson, who had been a pilot attached to the division, told the audience that while he'd heard rumors of the death camps, he had been skeptical of them -- until April 4, 1945, when he flew over an enclosure with a great many people inside and decided to investigate.
"I had no idea what I was going to see," Pearson said, adding that one of the first things he saw was 75 bodies stacked just inside the gate. "That's the day I lost my emotional virginity.
"That was 20,244 days ago, and I remember it like it was last week," Pearson said.
All of the veterans who spoke were adamant that they were not heroes, but simply doing "what was expected" of them.
But Al Marks, a Houstonian and survivor of one of the camps, spoke for the numerous other survivors in the audience when he said, "You are our heroes."
In many countries in Europe you will be arrested for calling this what it is, a lie.
- Hannover
