WW2: Holocaust Studies

A repost from November 2006, now with a Barry Sister's audio enhanced video no less
While at my Uncle's unveiling my wife pointed out a memorial to the Martyrs of Budzanow:
The Martyrs Of Budzanow

Stephanie pointed out this grave monument at Beth David, opposite the "Greek" section. I was curious to find out about these people. My research led me to find: "Budzanów is included in the Suchostaw Region Research Group (SRRG). Shtetlach were interwoven together like a tapestry and the Jewish people of neighboring shtetlach linked by marriages, trade and marketing. They shared schools, cemeteries, kosher butchers, bakers and more. Smaller shtetlach registered their birth, marriages and death in a nearby larger shtetl." Also on a holocaust remembrance site, a survivor, Immanuel (Donio) Ashberg, Rehovot from Yanov, a nearby shtetl wrote the following.
"My Shtetl Yanov
Dedicated to my parents, my sister and to all residents of my town—be their memory blessed.
Yanov, a tiny shtetl located between the shtetl Budzanov from one side and Trembovla from the other side, was populated by Ukrainians and Poles. In its center lived about a hundred Jewish families. The main occupation of the majority of the Jews was trade (sales and purchases); a small part of them were craftsmen, and an even lesser part were waged workers and clerks. Many Jews were poor people, and the life was difficult for them. They worked hard to gain a penny and, adding grush to grush, to save a zloty. But despite a hard life they were happy.
All the Jews lived as one close family. All of them knew each other from the youngest to the oldest. We knew all of them and remembered their first and last names. Everyone also had a nickname.
Our mothers also worked very hard. In addition to that they were housewives and helped the welfare of the family. They didn't have housemaids (maidservants). My mother – be her memory blessed – worked very hard. She was a very good housewife and also the one who was the main supporter of the family. She took care of me and my sister Batya – be her memory blessed – and was happy. She didn't have the living conditions that we have here in our land. There was no electricity or running water in the house, and there was no gas. We didn't have an electric iron. Our iron was with the coals. There was no refrigerator or washing machine and no other basic utilities. Nevertheless we never heard someone complain.
We carried water from the well, and in winter also from the river Seret. This was an occupation that was called in Yiddish “vasser treger” (water carrier), which does not exist in our country [Israel]. I remember two of this kind of professional, Bertsi and Shaya, be their memory blessed. In every Jewish house there was a wooden or iron barrel, and a water carrier filled it for a couple of grushes. Bertsi carried water on his shoulders. Shaya was more progressive. He had a horse harnessed with a cart on two wheels and a big barrel, like Tevye der Melchiker. He distributed water – in the winter with the “free addition of ice.” His mustache and all the liquid under his nose were frozen from the cold, and when he entered a well heated house, the ice which was under his nose melted and dripped right into the bucket and the barrel. The earnings of these two were very poor, and in addition to that they were blessed with many children.
Instead of an electric light we used an oil lamp. We bought oil in bottles in the store. We cooked our food on a stove that was heated by fire wood. We kept our food in a basement in order that it would not go bad. We didn't know that it could be otherwise. And everybody was happy with his lot.
We already said that all the Jews lived as one close family. We knew what was going on in every house. We felt much better on Shabbat and holidays. Who among us does not remember all the preparations, all the goodies that our mothers cooked and baked. In fact, they made everything to celebrate Shabbat and holidays with the best of everything. We all, from the youngest to the oldest, went to the synagogue. There were those who prayed inside, and there were those who chatted outside. Nevertheless, everyone went to the synagogue, the religious people and the secular ones.
No one of these two groups would desecrate the Shabbat and holiday. No one was riding on Shabbat, and no one ate non-kosher. We didn't smoke on Shabbat and kept separately plates and dishes for milk products and for meat products. I am not from a religious family, but nevertheless we kept all the laws of kashrut. I remember how my mother – be her memory blessed – sent me to a goy to bring the milk. I went with three jugs in order that the milk would not be poured out straight from the jug of a goy. With the first they milked the cow, the second was used as a measure, and finally they poured milk into the third jug. On Shabbat I went to a goy who would light a match to light the stove in order to warm up the food. For this he would get a piece of chalah. On the evening of Shabbat I went outside to see whether candles were lit in the House of Study in order to learn if it was already permitted to kindle the oil lamp, although we weren't especially religious.
On holidays the young people had a lot of fun. Who among them did not receive some new clothes or new shoes ? Parents made extraordinary efforts to start saving money (at least) two months before the holidays, and they were very happy if they succeeded in giving their sons and daughters new clothes for the holiday. On Shabbat and holidays we did not write. There was no Jewish school, and we went to the school of Goyim. On Shabbat we did not study in order not to desecrate the Shabbat, and this was not agreeable with the Goyish teachers who ordered us to come to school and also to study on Shabbat. A delegation of Jewish dignitaries of the town addressed the administration of the school and persuaded the principal that Jewish children would come to the school after the prayers in the synagogue without pens, and they would not write in order not to desecrate the Shabbat.
In addition to our studies in the school, in the afternoons we studied in the “cheder.” In our town there were several cheders. One of them was that of Yudel Hershel-Leib, another that of Shaya—be their memories blessed. Cheder like that was usually located in the living quarters of the melammed, a small room that also served as a kitchen, a dining room, a bedroom and a living room. We were crowded there, each sitting next to the other. We studied Torah according to the system of the melammeds of that time. In winter, because the day was short, we studied also in the evening. Every boy had a candle lamp because there was no lighting in the streets, and it was impossible to walk on a dark and muddied street. The lamp was very primitive—an iron box with a glass and a candle lit inside. We studied in the cheder even during the summer vacation.
In the center of the town groups of Jews assembled and chatted about any subject imaginable. The young people also concentrated in separate groups, or they walked on central streets, and especially walked outside of the town. They also feared getting a stone on the head from sheygetses. The landscapes outside of the shtetl were very nice – fields, the river, and the forest attracted all of us. All the meetings happened in the bosom of beautiful nature.
The shtetl itself was charmingly beautiful. It was surrounded by the forest, the river and fields. Many houses were in the middle of gardens which were extremely well kept. Among such houses was also our house with the garden of which my father – be his memory blessed – took great care. It was full of beautiful trees, bushes, all kinds of vegetables and flowers. Also, the garden of Moshe Balaban – be his memory blessed – was very well kept and attracted a lot of visitors.
Almost all the Jews of the shtetl belonged to a Zionist club. There were two clubs: Hitahdut Poale Zion and Ahvah. The meetings were held in the evenings and on Shabbat, and lectures were delivered on Palestine. Jews read newspapers. In every house there was a money-box of K.K.L., and everybody contributed to the common cause. I was among those who collected money from these money-boxes, and I recollect especially the money-box of Berl Kahana – be his memory blessed—the husband of Sheyndl Kahana who lives in Petah-Tikvah. His money-box was always full and included a considerable amount of money.
There were two youth movements: Ha-shomer ha-Tsair and Ha-noar ha-Tsiyoni. In the organization of Ha-noar ha-Tsiyoni I was among the leaders of the group. We met in the evening on weekdays and on Shabbat to listen to lectures on Palestine and to study Hebrew. We went on excursions and trips to the neighboring towns—Trembovla, Budzanov and Horostkov and made preparations to make aliyah to Palestine. All the young people were raised to love Palestine and to make aliyah.
We didn't go to the movies or to theaters. There were no movie theaters in our shtetl. Among the young people there were some creative personalities. They would select actors among us and prepare a spectacle themselves with no professional help. They would stage usually very nice and entertaining dramas. Such an entertainment occurred usually once per year or even more seldom. There was no special club for entertainment in our shtetl. We used for this purpose a long, wide corridor in the house of Shalom Kornblau – be his memory blessed – or the similar corridor in the house of Leib Gur-Arye – be his memory blessed. We collected chairs from the houses of the entire shtetl. We constructed the stage from the lumber borrowed from the above mentioned Shalom Kornblau's trade company. All the works and the spectacle were realized by oil lamp lighting.
Everything above mentioned came to an end on September 1, 1939. The war started. The Hitlerians cruelly attacked Poland and advanced to our places enormously fast. We were all in panic. It was Rosh Hashanah. All of us were in the synagogue, we prayed enthusiastically. After the service the majority of the residents started to pack their belongings and to prepare their escape from the shtetl. I recollect that upon my return from the synagogue my mother – be her memory blessed – handed me a backsack with some clothes and said: “Do not worry about us, go with everybody. Save yourself! And tears covered her eyes and cheeks. At home there was no festive atmosphere of Rosh Hashanah like in years past, but this was a day of mourning. I worked then in Manheim Abramtzi's store – be his memory blessed—and although this was holiday, I went to help him pack his goods in the store. He also was in preparation to flee the town. The same was going on in the entire shtetl.
After the holiday we heard surprise news: the Russians are coming. They arrived on September 17, 1939. It was a big joy. We were saved from the Nazis. Again groups of Jews assembled, chatted, argued and waited. Polish policemen threw down their uniforms, the officers fled, and soldiers left their military units. At noon the first Russian detachments entered with not a single shot. Most of the officers in the Russian units were Jewish. We were happy that we were saved from the Nazi monsters.
Our saviors left a very bad impression on us from the first glance. Russian soldiers, as well as officers, wrapped their tobacco in a piece of newspaper and smoked it – we never saw this kind of smoking. And what buyers they were! They would come to a store and buy everything. Then we started to grasp what is awaiting us. Life became even harder than it was before. There was rationing in everything. In order to buy a little sugar or a piece of fabric to sew clothes there was needed protection with the vendor. There was liquidation of private stores and investigation of everyone's past. There was no end to investigations. Then Asi Pohoryles—the devoted Communist, disappeared. The trials of the Jews for their business started, and they usually finished with the confiscation of the property and exile in Siberia. Freedom and happiness disappeared from the shtetl Yanov. Zionist clubs were closed, and we lived in fear that some information on our past will reach our saviors because “Zionist” was a term for a criminal to them.
I started to look for a job, and after a long time seeking I found a job in a neighboring shtetl, Budzanov, which was located 7 kilometers from Yanov. I walked this distance on foot every day. There were no buses.
I and my friend, Koba Balaban, who also got a job in the same office in Budzanov, would wake up early in the morning and walk together to Budzanov, and after work we would walk back home. No one complained, we didn't think that it could be better. And here comes the cold winter. All the roads are covered with high hills of snow. We reach our work place several hours late. The Russian boss, the Communist, is angry for our lateness, but for the first time has mercy on us – he said he hopes this is our first and last coming late, he will not tolerate this a second time. After that we decided to rent a room in Budzanov and came home only once a week – on Sundays.
In this office, most of the employees and administrators were the Jews from Yanov and Budzanov. There were very few Gentiles. The Jews from these shtetls were noted for their knowledge more than the Gentiles, and they were more capable at office jobs. We worked, we excelled, but our fear of NKVD and members of the Communist party, owners of a red membership card, didn't leave us due to continued investigations and trials. We suffered quietly. We were afraid to talk. There was no choice. We were getting used to this kind of life.
Also this situation didn't continue for a long time. On June 21, 1941 a new war started. Again Hitler started the war, this time against Russia, his ally. There was declared general mobilization. And I received a telephone call from Yanov, and I was informed that I was drafted. The next day I arrived home. My mother – be her memory blessed – again was worried about me, and the backsack was ready…however it was home. My parents and sister – their memories blessed – cried because I became a soldier and had to go for war, and when people go for war, who knows if they will come back.
I took from my pocket all the money I had, took off my wrist watch and handed it to my parents because I knew that it is safer to leave it with them, and maybe they will feel a need because they stay home. I grabbed the backsack and parted from them – I didn't think then that separation will be forever, that I will never again see my beloved family and my house. It didn't occur to me that there will be no one to whom to return. The tears suffocated me. All my dear ones cried. And I left confused and disturbed together with the rest of the youth from our shtetl to report to the Red army.
The suffering was great. Together with the youth from Yanov and Budzanov I reached Zhitomir which is located in Ukraine. Here we were divided into many groups. I parted from my friends and remained with a small group. I didn't see my friends again because most of them were killed in the front. The Hitlerians advanced very fast, conquered the entire Ukraine and penetrated a long distance into Russia.
In Russia we heard a lot about what was going on in lands conquered by the Nazis. We were informed about their cruelty. It was difficult to believe the stories published in the Soviet newspapers and on the radio. I always hoped this was just Soviet propaganda, and that I will find all my beloved at home, well and healthy.
Four long years passed. I happened to be in Siberia. I suffered quietly and hoped for an end and salvation. The Germans were in retreat. In the beginning of 1944 my shtetl was liberated. I sent a lot of letters to my parents in Yanov. I thought they were alive. I also wrote to our Gentile neighbors. To all my letters I received only one reply from a Gentile woman called Dzurba. Her letter revealed to me all the horrible truth. Yanov does not exist for me. My parents are not among the living. There is not my sister. There are no living Jews. Gentiles robbed our property, they occupied our homes. Our beautiful and famous synagogue does not exist any more. Yanov became one big ruin. From several hundred souls, the souls which were dear to me, only a few remained alive.
Today about ten people from Yanov reside in Israel, and a similar number are in the USA. This is a tragic end of our beautiful shtetl."

Always Remember My Name, by Marisabina Russo

I have a lot of book resources for kids to accompany the WW2 topic. Here's a beautiful one that I scanned. I originally used buttons for this slide show to manually turn the pages. It won't convert in that fashion for a streamed video, so here I re-did it and timed it at 10 seconds per page. However, you can always stop it manually and then restart. You just have to give it time to fully load. You won't be able to read it in this size but I think you get a sense of the story. Great illustrations. Some reviews:
Grade 2-4–The experiences of Russo's relatives before, during, and after World War II are the basis for this story about a grandmother sharing with her young granddaughter photo albums of her "first life" (in Germany) and her "second life" (after the war). Rachel's family gathers for Sunday dinner at Oma's. After the meal, Oma tells the girl of her marriage and her family's happy life; her husband's death after World War I; the rise of the Nazi party and denial of rights to Jews; the burning and looting of Jewish businesses; and life in a concentration camp. At war's end, Oma and her three daughters were reunited in America. Now she gives Rachel the gold heart necklace that her own grandmother gave her many years ago when her family left Poland for Germany ("When you wear this…always remember me and…May luck follow you wherever you go"). This book introduces the Holocaust in a simple but factual narrative that can be easily understood by youngsters who have no knowledge of World War II. Gouache illustrations in Russo's familiar folk style are accompanied by many re-creations of old photos, government papers, money, an identity card–all helping to bring the events to life. Photos on the endpapers show the author's family. This offering answers the need for appropriate Holocaust literature for young children and should be considered a first purchase.–Susan Scheps, Shaker Heights Public Library, OH
Copyright

From Booklist
Gr. 3-5. In a moving picture book, Russo tells her Jewish family's story of Holocaust survival. She remembers herself as a small child visiting her grandmother, Oma, who tells Russo the family history with photos stretching back to Oma's youth and marriage before World War I. Children will need help to understand the multigenerational time frame and to keep track of who's who; in fact, the book may appeal more to adults than to young readers. But Russo personalizes the history with photo-album entries printed on the endpapers, and her gouache illustrations, framed like photos, show the individuality and strength of family members as they faced the Nazis who sought to destroy all Jews. Miraculously, Oma and her three daughters, two of whom were in the camps, survived to be reunited in the U.S. An afterword fills in some Holocaust history. Hazel Rochman

Sound Portraits: Bergen Belsen

http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/bergen-belsen/
Bergen-Belsen
Recorded in Near Celle, Germany.
Premiered April 20, 2002, on Weekend Edition Saturday.
On April 15, 1945, British forces liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. Sixty-thousand prisoners were living in the camp when the troops arrived, most of them seriously ill. Thousands more lay dead and unburied on the camp grounds.
BBC reporter Patrick Gordon Walker was among the press corps that entered Bergen-Belsen with the British troops that day. Over the next few weeks, he documented what he saw, recording the first Sabbath ceremony openly conducted on German soil since the beginning of the war, interviewing survivors, and speaking to British Tommies about what they had witnessed at liberation.
One of the people who heard Walker's radio dispatches was soon-to-be-legendary folk-music producer Moe Asch. An engineer at the time at New York radio station WEVD, Asch recorded the shortwave broadcast onto an acetate disc. Decades later, the record was re-discovered at the Smithsonian Institution by historian Henry Sapoznik.

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/BergenBelsen/Introduction.html
Bergen-Belsen was the name of an infamous Nazi camp which has become a symbol of the Holocaust that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews more than sixty years ago. In 1943, Bergen-Belsen was initially set up as a detention camp (Aufenthaltslager) for prisoners who held foreign passports and were thus eligible to be traded for German citizens being held in Allied internment camps. In December 1944, Bergen-Belsen became a concentration camp under the command of Josef Kramer, the former Commandant of the Auschwitz II camp, also known as Birkenau.
A section for sick prisoners, who could no longer work in the Nazi forced labor camps, was set aside in March 1944. In 1945, when World War II was drawing to a close, civilian prisoners were evacuated from other concentration camps as Russian troops advanced westward; thousands of these prisoners had been brought to the Bergen-Belsen camp which was not equipped to handle such a large number of people. Finally, Bergen-Belsen itself was right in the middle of the war zone where bombs were falling and Allied planes were strafing the Autobahn and the railroads. British and Germans troops were doing battle on the Lüneberg heath right outside the camp. In February 1945, the situation at Bergen-Belsen became catastrophic when a typhus epidemic broke out in the crowded camp where a typhoid epidemic was already claiming thousands of lives.
Emaciated corpses were thrown into mass graves at Bergen-Belsen
Hitler's second in command, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, had been plotting behind Hitler's back in an attempt to negotiate a peace with America and Great Britain, with the aim of forming an alliance to fight against the Communists. He knew that half of Germany and all of Eastern Europe, with a population of 120 million people, had been promised to the Communists by American president Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference. As the leader who was in charge of all the concentration camps (his rank in the SS was equivalent to a 5-star General in the US Army), he planned to use the Jewish prisoners as bargaining chips in his negotiations with the non-Communist Allies.
Himmler was determined to do all he could to hamper the inevitable take-over of Europe by the Communists. To this end, beginning on April 5, 1945, he ordered the execution of Communist leaders being held at the three main concentration camps in Germany: Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald.
Before surrendering Bergen-Belsen to the British on April 15, 1945, Himmler ordered about 7,000 people to be evacuated from the camp. The three train loads of prisoners, which left the camp between April 6 and April 11, were made up of prominent Dutch Jews, Hungarian Jews, Jewish prisoners from neutral countries and Jewish prisoners who held foreign passports. Himmler was hoping to use these prisoners to negotiate with the Allies. The rest of the prisoners at Bergen-Belsen were to be voluntarily turned over to the enemy.
On April 4, 1945, American soldiers had seen their first Nazi horror camp in Germany, the abandoned forced labor camp at Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald. On April 11, American troops had discovered Buchenwald, which had already been taken over by the Communist political prisoners there. The next day, on April 12, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt died and Himmler had renewed hopes of negotiating a surrender to the Americans and the British, but not to the Communist Soviet Union. It was within this context that Himmler began negotiations to voluntarily turn the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp over to the British in early April 1945.
Two German officers were sent to a British outpost to explain that there were 9,000 sick prisoners in the camp and that there was no water after the electric pump had been hit in an Allied bombing attack. The Germans proposed that the British Army should occupy the camp immediately to keep the epidemics in the camp from spreading to the troops on both sides. In return, the Germans offered to surrender the bridges over the river Aller. At first, the British rejected the German proposals, saying it was necessary that the British should occupy an area of ten kilometers around the camp in order to be sure of keeping their troops away from the epidemic, but eventually a compromise was reached and the British agreed. On April 15, 1945, Bergen-Belsen was surrendered to British Officer Derrick Sington, who wrote about it in a small book called "Belsen Uncovered" which was published by Duckworth, London in 1946.
As a result of the British Army taking control, Bergen-Belsen became the first Nazi horror camp to become widely known to the American public. After the British revealed the Nazi atrocities to the world, this camp came to epitomize the brutality and depravity of the Nazis who called the German people the Master Race (Herrenvolk) and who were carrying out a systematic plan to kill the Jews and others whom they considered undesirable (Untermenschen). Thanks to the British Army, which filmed the unbelievable sights that greeted them when they entered the camp, a grim record of the atrocities exists to this day.
Anne Frank, the most famous victim of the Holocaust, lies in an unmarked mass grave at Bergen-Belsen, the date of her death unknown. Both Anne and her sister Margot died in the camp during one of the world's largest epidemics of typhus, a disease which is spread by body lice.

Vern Tott's Story, Linked To Ben Sieradzki's

from
Vernon Tott quit high school and snuck into the military so he could fight for his country. Like many soldiers, Tott learned to accept the realities of war. His 84th Infantry Division fought in the Battle of the Bulge and lost a third of its troops. But, when Tott's battalion headed toward the city of Hanover, Germany, in April 1945, members of the 84th were totally unprepared for their next encounter.

"There was a road," says concentration camp survivor Ben Sieradzki. "And we saw soldiers. One of them brought out a ... baseball."

The barely alive survivors of the Ahlem slave labor camp realized the soldiers must be Americans.

"We started screaming, 'Come on up here, come on up here,' and some of them were just bewildered. They didn't know it was a concentration camp," Sieradzki said.

Tott, who died in 2005 from cancer, said he and the other soldiers were unaware of the existence of the camps and were shocked at what they saw.

"We were witnessing hell on earth," Tott said at an 84th Infantry reunion. "Piles of dead bodies. Men in ragged clothing that were just skin and bones ... Me and the soldiers with me, it made us sick to your stomachs and even cried what we seen there."

Forgetting the War

What the soldiers saw were wraithlike prisoners, some near death lying in their own urine, ravaged by dysentery, typhus and other diseases. A few days before, German guards marched hundreds of able-bodied prisoners to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. They left those too sick, like Sieradzki, to die.

Not quite believing what he saw and wanting to share his horrified disbelief with family back in Sioux City, Iowa, Tott pulled out his pocket camera.

"Actually, the infantrymen weren't supposed to carry cameras, but a lot of them did, so I got a lot of pictures during the war," he said.

After the war, Tott stashed his photographs from Ahlem in a shoebox on a shelf in his basement in Sioux City. He put the war behind him.

"I think so many people put away that stuff on a shelf and wanted to forget," said his stepdaughter, Donna Jensen. "I think our whole country's put it on a shelf."

Stepson Jon Sadler remembers rummaging through the basement with his friends and sneaking peeks at the photos.

"In junior high, we'd open up the box and think, boy, this is terrible," Sadler said. "Look what my dad saw in the war. We just always assumed nobody ... in those pictures [survived]. They looked so horrible and sick."

Searching for the Photographer

For 50 years, Tott held the same assumption. Then, in his army newsletter in 1995, Tott spotted an inquiry from Sieradzki, a retired engineer in Berkeley, Calif. Sieradzki was searching for whoever took photographs of himself and other prisoners when Ahlem was liberated.

Tott went into his basement and found his old shoebox. He called Sieradzki, who remembers, "The telephone rang. 'My name is Vernon Tott and I think you're looking for me.' And I said, 'Are you still a tall blonde fellow?' And he said, 'Not any longer.'"

The two men talked many times that day. Tott made copies of his black-and-white snapshots and sent them to Sieradzki. In one of the photos, Sieradzki saw dead bodies piled on the ground in front of some barracks. In the foreground, was a huddle of skeletal prisoners. On the extreme left he saw himself.

Just hours before that picture was taken, the prisoners were handed some civilian clothes. Sieradzki changed out of his striped, ragged uniform into a "funny looking" jacket, hat and pants, which were too long, so he stuck them in his socks. This is the only known photograph of Sieradzki at liberation.

Sieradzki was 18 years old and weighed less than 80 pounds. He had endured more than five years of unimagined misery. It started in 1939, when his family was forced to live in a rundown slum district in Lodz, Poland, with 200,000 other Jews, called the Lodz Ghetto.

During this time, Sieradzki's parents and one sister were taken away and killed. His other sister died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Sieradzki survived three concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and eventually ended up in the slave labor camp called Ahlem, near Hannover, Germany. Near the end, his worsening health confined him to the barracks.

"They called people like me musselmen — goners," he writes in a short story about the war years. "Other prisoners started to steal my ration of food. There was no use to waste food on the likes of me."

An older cousin of Sieradzki's arrived as a new prisoner to the camp and urged him to eat. He says his cousin, a man who already lost his wife and young children in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, gave him hope.

When Sieradzki saw Tott's pictures of the Ahlem camp 50 years later, he was angry at first. The photographs released a flood of dark memories. But then Sieradzki was grateful, he said, "because I had no record of that horrible time, and here I am."

There were other official photographs taken at Ahlem. The Red Cross filmed the camp, but Sieradzki describes Tott as his true witness — and not because he helped liberate the camp. It's for what he did later with his photographs.

Tott realized there might be other survivors, like Sieradzki. And perhaps, he could provide them a piece of their past. So, he launched a quest to track them down.

The Angel of Ahlem

Eventually, Tott located nearly 30 Ahlem survivors, across the United States and in Canada, Sweden and Israel. More than 16 are in his photographs. In 2001, he returned to Hannover with three of those survivors to help dedicate a memorial at Ahlem. And he traveled to Poland for the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto.

In 2003, Tott's name was inscribed on a wall of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

"To Vernon W. Tott, My Liberator and Hero," Ahlem survivor Jack Tramiel had engraved on the wall. Tramiel, founder of Commodore Computer, is also a founder of the Holocaust Museum.

"I have to make sure that this man is going to be remembered for what he has done," Tramiel said. "His family should know that he is to us, a hero. He's my angel."

Earlier this year, Tott's hometown, Sioux City, hosted the premiere of a documentary about him, called Angel of Ahlem, produced by the University of Florida's Documentary Institute. More than 1,000 people came to see the film at the historic downtown Orpheum Theatre, including some survivors. They also had the chance to walk through the first public exhibit of Tott's photographs.

In May, Angel of Ahlem was shown at New York City's Lincoln Center. Nearly a dozen survivors were there — reunited because of Tott, his pocket camera and his unwavering determination.

The documentary was introduced by another member of the 84th Infantry, who helped liberate Ahlem, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

"There's nothing I'm more proud of, of my service to this country than having been one of those who had the honor of liberating the Ahlem concentration camp," Kissinger told the audience.

Kissinger grew up in Germany and became a U.S. citizen in 1943. He said many articles have described him as being traumatized during his childhood in Nazi Germany.

"That's nonsense," he said, "They were not yet killing people. A traumatic event was to see Ahlem.

"It was the single most shocking experience I have ever had."

And then Kissinger made a special request. He invited the survivors to come up on the stage and have a picture taken with him.

Slowly, deliberately, the white-haired survivors — who'd been brutalized, then rescued from desperate circumstances, so many years before — made their way to the Lincoln Center stage. As they gathered, it was clear that the most important person missing from this one last photograph was Vernon Tott.

Ben Sieradzki's Story

from npr.org, part of the effort to remember WW2 to coincide with the Burns' special. Perhaps someone should show it to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Ben Sieradzki was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the summer of 1944. He was 17. Ben and his older sister Anna were loaded onto one of the infamous overcrowded box cars for the journey to Auschwitz.

The only possession Sieradzki carried with him was the family album. He held it tightly to his chest until he was forced to drop it after arrival at the camp. The only existing photographs of Sieradzki's parents and two sisters, who died in the Holocaust, are from an uncle who moved to Denmark years earlier. The photographs exist today in a cherished album Sieradzki keeps at his home in Berkeley, Calif.

Sieradzki was born in 1927, the youngest of five children, in the Polish city of Zgierz, a suburb of Lodz. When Sieradzki and his sister Anna were forced to go Auschwitz, they had already lost their parents and other sister, during their time in the Lodz Ghetto. They didn't know what happened to their brothers, who would later survive the war in a Siberian prison.

Anna and Ben were separated when they arrived at Auschwitz. Sieradzki remembers marching through the camp complex for the first time.

In a story about those years, he wrote, "We could see smoke stacks of the crematoriums with their billowing smoke. One of the guards said, 'These are your folks going up in smoke who just arrived here with you.'"

Sieradzki never saw his sister Anna again.

He was assigned to a teenage barrack.

"The barrack held about 1,000 Jewish teenagers from several countries in Europe, but most of them were from the Lodz ghetto. There were no beds and no blankets; we slept on the bare cement floor. We had to lie on one side and could not turn; there was no room to turn."

In September 1944, Sieradzki was transported to a work camp near Hannover, Germany, where inmates worked 12-hour shifts in a rubber plant.

"After several months of hard labor each day, and the ever-present hunger, cold and abuse to endure, after four and half years of the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz, we were all tired, denigrated and downcast," he wrote. "A lot of us got sick or injured, and soon after we arrived, people started to die on a daily basis. I saw several people dying during a roll call and after severe beatings."

Sieradzki was moved again, this time to the Ahlem slave labor camp, where he was later liberated.

"The winter of 1944-45 was very cold and harsh," Sieradzki wrote. "The prisoners in camp were starting to die off in very high numbers, either from diseases, severe beatings, accidents, starvation, exposure, or suicide. We slept two in a bunk, head opposite each other.

"The young man who shared my bunk could not get up one morning. I shook him … he was dead. I remember only his last name, Citron, and that his father had a candle factory. The last several days of his life, he would recite poetry in Polish and sing mournful songs. He must have been a very bright young man. We will never know."

The guards were extremely cruel. "One of the German guards forced pebbles into a dead man's mouth, proclaiming, 'Here, you Jew-pig, have something to eat!'" Sieradzki wrote.

The Ahlem camp was liberated by members of the U.S. 84th Infantry Division on April 10, 1945. A few days earlier, the German guards marched hundreds of able-bodied prisoners to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. They left those too weak behind to die, including Sieradzki. He was suffering from numerous wounds, tuberculosis, typhus, dysentery and severe malnutrition.

"At that time, I was just 18 years old, a sick liberated survivor with no ideas about my future," he wrote. "I had no clue as to what kind of person I might become, living in a free society without the perpetual threats to my life and sanity. I had been living like a gazelle in a lion's compound, without any measure of security or comfort."

Sieradzki recuperated for several months in Swedish military hospitals. He immigrated to the United States in 1953. He's a retired engineer and lives in Berkeley, Calif., with his wife, Gloria. They have two sons and three granddaughters. The two oldest are named for Ben's sisters who died in the Holocaust.