May 8 marks the 80-year anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. But even before the war officially ended, Allied troops liberated Nazi concentration camps across German-occupied areas.
Eighty years ago Tuesday, the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp began. When American troops arrived at Dachau, they found nearly 70,000 prisoners.
“Large numbers were simply abandoned and left to die,” said Dan Stone, the director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway. “They were largely Jews who’d been evacuated there from other camps further east.”
Elly Gotz, who grew up in Lithuania, was one of those prisoners. In 1941, Gotz was 13. He remembers the German Army arriving and immediately attacking Jews. His family was rounded up with the rest of the Jewish population of Kaunas, Lithuania.
“The Germans took over and put us in a ghetto,” Gotz said. “Thirty thousand Jews were jammed in a ghetto. Very crowded conditions. A tough life.”
After three years there, Gotz, his father and three uncles were sent to Dachau.
“We were put to work 12-hour shifts, construction work. We slept on hard boards,” Gotz said. “We got nothing to eat, and we had no washing facilities. I didn’t have a shower for 10 months. We were full of lice. The lice were drinking our blood and brought us disease.”
Gotz worked as a mechanic building an underground factory that would be used to manufacture fighter jets. But the factory was never finished.
“We started to die after a few months, even young people started to die,” Gotz said. “I had to carry the first dead body. It was very difficult, but then I got used to it. I carried more dead bodies than I could count.”
Gotz said that when the American Army arrived at Dachau, they put all the prisoners on a train to the central part of the camp.
“My father was very close to death. He was dying. I begged my father not to die,” Gotz said. “My father weighed 65 pounds. And he said to me, ‘Elly, I don’t know how much longer I will be with you, my son.’ I was sure he was going to die that night.”
The next morning, however, Gotz’s father was still alive. Gotz went to get soup and bread for himself and his father. Then, he saw an American Jeep pull up outside.
“I said, ‘Father, we made it. They promised to kill us before the war is over. We are alive and the Americans are here,’” Gotz said. “And my father said, ‘Oh, that’s good. Have you got the bread?’ I was still holding this piece of bread. It was my moment of liberation.”
While he acknowledges the power of emancipation at concentration camps, Stone of the Holocaust Research Institute said the word ‘liberation’ doesn’t tell the full story.
Often, he said, history focuses on the concentration camps and overlooks local massacres of Jewish people across Europe during the war. In 1941, a police officer in Belarus wrote to his wife about shooting truckloads of Jews. In Lithuania, a man beat 50 Jewish people to death in front of a crowd.
“Large numbers of Jews were killed by collaborationist regimes,” Stone said, “or in the case of Romania, which is the best example, an independent sovereign country that was allied to Nazi Germany.”
Stone says that since the end of World War II, there has been a push to put all the blame on Germany and erase the history of violence against Jewish people in other countries.
“Once the commissions of inquiry that took place in the post-Cold War context in the countries of Eastern Europe published their findings, a lot of local nationalists objected and said, ‘We shouldn’t be airing our dirty laundry in public,’” Stone said. “We still see a great deal of tension over simply accepting the historical facts.”
Plus, concentration camp survivors live with complex trauma after their liberation. Gotz says that when he got out of Dachau, he hated the Germans for what he’d endured.
“I was full of hate, and I was looking for a gun to kill them. And after a while, I gave up the idea because I said to myself, ‘What are you thinking? You can’t kill people in peacetime. Give it up. Stop hating. Think about yourself. What are you going to do? You are 17 years old and your life is in front of you,’” Gotz said. “When I stopped hating, I started living for the first time.”
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Thomas Danielian produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Grace Griffin adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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