Story of Dachau Survivor and his Liberator

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception



German youth ... atrocities done in their name

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Dachau survivor Ernie Gross, then only 85 pounds after nearly a year of sickness, abuse and constant hunger, had no doubt April 29, 1945, was his last day on earth.


Don Greenbaum, a soldier with Gen. George Patton's Third Army 283rd Field Artillery Battalion, arrived that day at Dachau expecting to seize ammunition, clothing and food that was kept for the Nazis notorious SS forces.

'As we got near Dachau, about a mile outside the camp, there was an odor we couldn't identify,' Greenbaum said. 'When we arrived, I saw the boxcars. They were full of bodies.'


History would come to call it the Dachau death train: some 40 cattle cars holding more than 2,000 men and women evacuated from another camp — and left to die on the train — in the final weeks of World War II.

'We had at that time never heard the expression 'concentration camp,' we never heard of a death camp,' Greenbaum said. 'None of us had any idea.'


Gross, a Romanian Jew, was 15 when he and his family were taken from their home, deported to a ghetto in Hungary and eventually packed on a standing-room-only boxcar to Auschwitz in 1942.

At the urging of a man next to him as they waited in line to be processed, he lied and told the SS officer he was 17.

Any younger and he'd be deemed incapable of hard labor and, he was told, immediately killed.

'The same guy who told me to lie said to me, 'Do you see that smoke in the sky where the sun cannot get through? This is going to be your parents in about two hours,' he recalled. 'My parents and younger brother and younger sister ... that's the last time I saw them.' Of his two older brothers also sent to labor camps, one — his favorite — also died.
In a state of starvation, and after months of daily beatings and backbreaking work, then-16-year-old Gross was shoved onto another boxcar, this time headed to Dachau, near Munich. It was supposed to arrive a day before the liberation, on April 28, but American bombings delayed the train.


When he arrived the next day, barely able to walk, Gross knew he would soon be murdered: hanged, shot, gassed, he didn't know. He was so close to death that he didn't care.

'We were standing in this long line and we already knew where we were going,' he said. 'I was close enough that I could see the crematorium and, all of a sudden, I see the German soldiers throwing down their guns and running away.'

The first contingent of Americans had arrived.

'If they would have come an hour later, I would not be here to tell this story,' Gross said in accented English underscoring his eastern European roots. 'They took me right away, they knew I am falling apart, and they put me in a sanitarium to recuperate.'


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2110097/Dachau-survivor-liberator-meet-Pennsylvania-time-nearly-67-years-later.html#ixzz1oY6CWWHF