Voices of Veterans

-On being a part of the 71st Infantry Division's liberation of Gunskirchen Lager, a concentration camp in the Mauthausen complex, in Austria in May 1945:
… Now, you're into May, and we went and we found this dirt road going through the woods. So, we would get more of our troops going along the road, on both sides of the road, walking straight ahead, and then, the others on the side, doing the sweeping. … You could smell something, and it wasn't a very pleasant smell. What we were smelling was Gunskirchen Lager, and I guess the town would be Lambach, but there's also a town of Gunskirchen, so, it was known as Gunskirchen Lager, and we ultimately came upon this camp, with all the wire around it. No guards; they had left maybe forty-eight hours before us.

We had begun to encounter a straggler or two in rags, you know, emaciated, crying for help. All we could do was report back to battalion on the phone. … This was a huge camp. It turned out to have eighteen thousand Hungarians Jews in it, and a lot of them were intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, professors or whatever, but, for us, we reported back so that medical help could arrive, so that arrangements could be made. The dead were sleeping outside; I mean, they hadn't been buried. They had just been left there. … You never forget the smell. It's unworldly. You never forget the skeletons, the living sleeping in with the dead. They had no strength.

When the [German] SS left, the prisoners knew where the food supplies were. It was all locked, of course. Well, some of them were frenzied enough and had enough strength left to break open [the lock], find food and eat it on the spot, cold, and dropped dead. Bodies can't handle anything like that; it's impossible. Fortunately, there were several hundred young people, I'm talking about eight, nine, ten-year-olds, and so forth, they had survived up to this point. They were very close to death. I mean, a couple of more days and … everybody would have been finished.

… Division Headquarters sent down medics, nurses, went into Gunskirchen, got civilians, got German prisoners that we already … had taken, because they were surrendering to us, brought the prisoners back, so [that] they could have a burial for all these people. All they did was [dig] a big, common trench and dump all the stiff bodies in there, at least to clear up the area. … The hospitals that were around, wherever the towns were, took the young children to the different hospitals, if they could be saved.

… There are guys who like to sit around and talk about the war, and I've never been one of them. It happened. I was able to get out in one piece and resume a normal life, other than the horror of Gunskirchen Lager. That will always stay with me. That was the worst thing that ever happened, that I ever saw in my life.