“Innocents Among the Damned”

by Jerry Peter Hontas

The title of my experiences in World War II as a member of the 120th Evacuation Hospital unit could be contained in the four words, “innocents among the damned”.

There was nothing in my then youthful years growing up in Canton, Ohio, to prepare me for the shocking, mind-numbing, traumatic events which confronted me and my fellow “GI’s” on that soft, balmy spring day in April, 1945, when our unit, convoyed in trucks from Frankfurt, Germany, approached the outskirts of Weimar, in Thuringia.

On each side of the roadway, we saw corpse after corpse of dirty, emaciated, flannel-clad bodies lying grotesquely by the side of the road. It was only a prelude of what lay ahead.

Shortly thereafter, the convoy halted. Pup tents were pitched in the picturesque valley from which we could see a large forest ahead of us, and a fairly-like, small castle on a near-by hill.

How absolutely enchanting and peaceful was the scene of our encampment; German country-side at its picture postcard finest!

Then, within an hour of our arrival, the smell! That indescribable

odor struck our nostrils, and caused us to ask one another, “What is that awful smell?” “Where is it coming from?”

My buddy, Warren Priest, and I decided to walk up the narrow road which bi-sected the woods, in an effort to determine the source of that puzzling odor.

After a twenty minute walk up a gradual incline, through the forest,, we began to hear a low-pitched humming sound which grew more audible as we arrived at the summit, a plateau containing countless walking skeletons enclosed in a compound surrounded by high barbed-wire fencing, and now empty guard towers.

The eyes of the walking dead stared vacantly at us. We stared back, too numb at the sight of these thousands of devastated souls to even utter a single word or sound.

We entered the main gate with the ironic words arched over the entrance,, “Arbeit Macht Frei”

Work certainly did not bring freedom to these men, only starvation and death to thousands of their fellow prisoners.

The corpses that could not be disposed of rapidly enough by the Nazi guards, who fled upon arrival of American troops, were stacked in piles like so much cord-wood around the camp’s crematorium.

We now realized the source of that awful stench which puzzled us upon our arrival. It was the smell of death, and the remnants of the smoke from the chimney of the crematorium that belched from the ovens below, where the burning of human bodies by the thousands was Hitler’s legacy to the world; it was part of his final solution!

The memory of that smell remains unforgettable. It permeated that peaceful countryside like a pall. It tormented many of us as much as the gruesome sight of those tortured souls who stumbled about aimlessly, not knowing upon their liberation where to go, what to do, or what to say. They were so weak from hunger and torture, uncomprehending of the rapid events leading up to their freedom.

Yet, I came away from that death camp the world knows as Buchenwald with a newly acquired understanding of how men can keep his sense of dignity of dignity no matter how horrendous and tortured his existence.

Let me explain.

When the Nazi guards fled for their lives, the men in the segregated barracks quickly hoisted flags representing their respective countries.

Upon entering the camp, I had spotted the bluer and white striped Greek flag with the white cross. I hurried over to the barracks and spoke Greek to the men who had gathered around me. I was informed that they were Greek Jews from Salonika, Greece, who were transported in the death trains to Buchenwald. Their ragged bodies and dark eyes, sunken deep into their sockets spelled starvation.

Within moments I was hurrying back down the forest path to our encampment, where I filled a bag with whatever chocolates and cookies I could find in my tent.

Hurrying back to the barracks, I met the same group of men, and I laid the open bag on a large, round table, and urged them to help themselves.

They came forward, then stopped. I was taken aback. In their starved condition, I assumed they would all rush to the table and devour that chocolate candy which, in their wildest dreams in that death camp, they would ever expect to eat before death put them to rest.

Instead, one of the men stepped forward and said to me, “ Sir, we invite you to sit down with us, and help yourself first. You are our guest!”

That these starving skeletons were able to retain such a degree of civility

under the cruelest and most inhumane circumstances underscored for me, the fact that the human soul cannot be crushed so easily as the human body.

The medical officers of our unit, all fine men, did commit a well-meaning, unintentional error that was quickly rectified. We had taken over one of the Nazi guards’ barracks, and set up a buffet line to feed these emaciated people. Hot meat and vegetable soup, potatoes, bread and the like. The food was simple in itself, but too rich for the shrunken stomachs and digestive organs of the starved men. Several spontaneous deaths occurred. The lesson was quickly learned; feeding starving people in a spirit of compassion is a task that requires patience.

When we left Buchenwald, and convoyed to the small town of Cham in southeastern Bavaria, our job was to set up a hospital and give medical attention to the many Dachau Death Camp prisoners who, upon liberation, wandered through the countryside, dazed, weak, hungry, and so disoriented that they would simply collapse in their emaciated state alongside roadways and open fields.

Lying in their beds in our hospital, set up in a local hotel, time after time, at bedside, we would discover bread under their pillows. These patients, in great fear and dread of their awful past, saved a portion of bread served with their meals, “just in case----“

Fifty-six years have passed since those shocking months of April, 1945. in Germany. The scenes were so deeply etched in my memory that it is impossible to cast them aside-- or to forget--- or to permit time to dull the sharpness of those horrifying images of hell on earth.

The only thing that vanished was our innocence.