Tag: travel

Holocaust camp liberator: Melvin Waters

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In May 2012, on the anniversary of Victory over Europe, Melvin Waters met Margaret Hopkovitz, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. (Photo by Deborah Brown)

Melvin Waters is legally blind, a result of suffering from macular degeneration. But he can still see and smell that time in late April 1945 when he came upon the Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northwest Germany.

Historians say about 70,000 Jews, Russians, and other prisoners died at Bergen-Belsen during World War II. Among those who perished was Anne Frank, who died of typhus  in early March 1945 only weeks before the camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by a British armored division. Soldiers discovered roughly 53,000 prisoners at Bergen-Belsen, most of them half-starved and seriously ill.

Waters, an ambulance driver, arrived a little more than a week after the camp was liberated. He was assigned the duty of stretcher bearer.

Twenty years old, Waters never imagined this. He grew up in Lancaster, Texas, the son of a yeast salesman. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, at age seventeen, Waters tried in vain to join the war effort: first signing on with the Marine Corps and then the Army Air Corps. Both rejected him after he failed physicals. Unbeknownst to him he had high blood pressure. Then in the spring of 1944 he saw an advertisement in the Dallas Morning News and got a chance to join the war as an ambulance driver  for American Foreign Service, an organization that was recruiting drivers and rounding up U.S.-made Dodge ambulances to support British and other foreign troops.

Waters was shipped overseas with platoons of other American drivers and in early 1945 they accompanied British, Polish, New Zealander, and Canadian troops up the boot of Italy through France to Belgium and Holland and across the Rhine into Germany.

“We came out of the woods and there on our left was the concentration camp. We were pretty close to the front of the convoy and I noticed that the convoy slowed down to a very slow pace,” Waters said. “And I guess I must have questioned what was going on. And then about that time I looked over to the left and there was a concentration camp. It was the first I knew we were going to a concentration camp.”

What did you see?

“There were a lot of people milling around and lot of them outside with striped convict uniforms on and people just kind of acted like they were in a stupor.”

They seemed in a daze?

“They stared blankly. They looked at us and looked right through us. There was barbed wire. The gate was wide open. A lot of them were outside in a ditch and they just looked like they didn’t know what to do. This was before any evacuation.”

“There were ashes everywhere and the smell: It was the most awful smell I’ve ever smelled,” he said.

Bergen-Belsen was first used to imprison Russian soldiers and then, starting in 1943, housed Jews and others. The Germans burned the bodies of thousands of prisoners in the camp’s crematorium. When it was liberated an estimated 13,000 unburied corpses were lying around the camp.

Waters helped transport those in the women’s barracks to a make-shift hospital. The first woman they approached tried to fight them off, throwing up her arms in defense. She feared that they were going to take her to the crematorium, where Waters said rumor had it the Germans burned alive weakened prisoners.

“She was very frail and completely out of her head,” he said. “Skin and bones.”

“She was in a bottom bunk and the British soldiers were taking her clothes off and we were there with a stretcher and we had to help her. She had a dress on and we took it off of her and wrapped her in a blanket.”

How old was she?

“It’s hard to say. All of them looked old, whether they were young or middle-aged or anything else. Being in a concentration camp they all looked like old women.”

They transported her to one of the small huts near the hospital that was set up in a former S.S. barracks. “We turned them into receiving stations. They would all be stripped of clothing. They cut their hair, de-liced them, put some clean clothing on them, and sent them to the hospital.”

“We used two men to a stretcher. We made probably a dozen trips a day or something like that. We had to line up. We had 72 men there eventually. We kept getting men from other platoons. We had near 50 ambulances there. That’s not official. We had the British medical team and I have pictures of them when they had protective gear. We all got gray hair.”

Why?

“That dusting that they put on you (to kill lice).”

“The ones we picked up were all too weak. The doctors, they were checking on the ones they could save and passing up on the ones that they couldn’t save.”

What did that feel like?

“You got where you didn’t have any feeling. You really did. Boy the smell was terrible. We drove up out of there and we passed a pit where they were stacking bodies. They had a flatbed truck and they had German prisoners and some men from the village down in the hole stacking bodies.”

In the ensuing weeks Waters was put on yard duty “which consisted of putting a German rifle on my shoulder and walking around tents at night.”

After the war, Waters said he didn’t talk much about his war experience and the liberation of the camp. In recent years, however, people have become more and more curious and have asked questions. And he tells his story.

In 2005, Waters returned to Bergen-Belsen, accompanied by two of his daughters and his wife, Josephine. “It was the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation. The official date was April 15.”

“It had a little museum at the time, but since they have built a big museum. They were going to reconstruct one of our ambulances.”

“I met a lot of Germans. The first time I ever gave a talk was in Hamburg. Just try to talk about a concentration camp to a bunch of young Germans. They were a good audience. But I didn’t say a lot. When the question-and-answer portion of the program came they did ask some questions that were embarrassing.”

What kinds of questions?

“Ones like you’re asking. They would ask how the people looked and how they were treated. Knowing that their parents and grandparents were involved in it. I thought of that.”

Have you forgiven them?

“I personally didn’t feel that way. I felt how can any human do this to another human? I guess I think more about it now than then.”

Is it important to tell your story?

“I don’t know. I didn’t tell it for years. It’s funny that more people are more interested in it now, since I went back for the sixtieth anniversary. In fact I saw this morning on TV they were talking about the liberation of Belgium because it was Anne Frank’s birthday.”

In May 2012, Waters was invited to an event hosted by the Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education and Tolerance where he met Margaret Hopkovitz, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen camp who lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

“She was sitting on the side by herself and someone told me she was over there and when I went over there and introduced myself to her and I got to talking to her.”

What did she say?

“She was very polite. She was not very talkative. I don’t remember what she said. I know she took my hand.”

Visiting a WWII stalag in a small Texas town

Heino Erichsen
Heino was an eighteen-year-old German infrantryman when this photo was taken in 1942.

Heino Erichsen was born June 7, 1924 in Kiel, Germany, a Baltic Sea port. When he was nine years old, Adolph Hitler became Germany’s chancellor and led the country into its irrational and destructive decade that led to perhaps the world’s largest and most gruesome war and ethnic persecution.

When he was growing up, Heino was among many thousands of German boys who became members of Hitler Youth, a compulsory military indoctrination program of the the German war machine. In May 1943, a month away from his eighteenth birthday, Heino was drafted into the German Army and sent to boot camp in Denmark, where he trained to fire machine guns, and within months he was a member of the German Afrika Korps sent to North Africa to fight a losing battle against the Allied forces. He was taken as a prisoner and shipped with hundreds of thousands of German prisoners to newly built POW camps in the United States. After arriving in New York and deloused, Heino was put on a train to Hearne, a little town in East Central Texas.

Heino was among as many as 4,800 German POWs who lived at Camp Hearne, where the government built 250 buildings: barracks, hospital buildings, guard towers, administrative facilities, mess halls and a building that prisoners converted into a 200-seat theater. The barbed wire that fenced in the POWs would line 1,800 miles, more than enough to stretch to Chicago.

Camp Hearne POW camp now houses a museum.
Camp Hearne POW camp now houses a museum.

Hearne city boosters had successfully lobbied the War Department to build the camp just outside of town as a way to bolster the local economy. It was among the largest of dozens of facilities in Texas that housed POWs during World War II.

Most of the German POWs at Hearne were noncommissioned officers, hard-liner sergeant types who were strong believers in the Third Reich. “We had some scary guys,” Melissa Freemen told me Friday during a tour of the Camp Hearne Exhibit and Visitors Center.

From all indications, Heino was not among the scaries. This morning I met Heino at the independent living facility he lives in The Woodlands, a little more than an hour’s drive from Hearne. He greeted me with a smile and lightly touched my arm as he shook my hand. His demeanor is of a kindly, gentle man in a cardigan sweater.

Speaking in a s German accent, Heino recalled that he spent most of his days as a prisoner working in local farms, shearing sheep, working with cows and plowing fields.

Heino was a lowly private in the German infantry, and was compelled to labor in the fields. But the German officers in the camp, roughly eighty percent of the prisoners, were not required to work, which is a provision of the Geneva Convention, the international agreement that governs the treatment of war prisoners to which the United States abided. The officers spent much of their days in recreation, playing soccer, going to classes, staging plays, crafting artwork and woodworking projects, and building gardens and water fountains to beautify the 700-plus acre site.

After the war, Heino went back to his hometown in Germany, and lucked into a cushy job: as a translator for a British government official who managed two German counties. But he never forgot Texas. In 1953 he emigrated to the United States with his young German bride and their son. He worked as an accountant at a hospital in Minnesota, and eventually divorced and became a single parent to his son. He met Jean, a Minnesota native and also a single parent, and they married in 1962. They both earned master’s degrees (his in business, hers in counseling). They adopted three children from Colombia and moved to Austin, where in 1981 they launched what the Erichsens say became the state’s first international adoption agency, Los Ninos.

Three years ago, after placing 3,000 orphans from 20 countries into new homes, the Erichsens retired and closed the agency and they now live outside of Houston.

These days, Heino is a celebrity of sorts at the Hearne camp, where he frequently visits to speak about his life and his experiences. “I’m the only former prisoner who came back and became a U.S. citizen and live in Texas,” Heino said. He co-authored a book about his life, “The Reluctant Warrior: Former German POW Finds Peace Texas.”

Nearly seventy years after the end of WWII, Camp Hearne is a shadow of its former self. The only original structures that remain are a water pump house and a small structure for a water well (both were renovated with a brick facade by the city long ago). The museum maintains eleven acres, where there is a newly built barrack that houses displays of artifact, photos and exhibits showing how the POWs lived and worked. Outside, is recently completed a guard tower.

Across the road from the museum, I walked about one-third of a mile down a path that long ago went down the middle of one of the three POW camp compounds. You can make out numerous concrete foundations on both sides that seem to want to be taken over by the scruffy underbrush, weeds and mesquite. You have to use your imagination to see thousands of German prisoners, dressed in Army fatigues with “POW” stamped on the back and wearing shorts during the hot summer months. Some sit on stoops, eyeing visitors walking this way, while others go about their activities, perhaps kicking a soccer ball or telling a story in German.

Kneeling Lady Foundation
The Kneeling Lady Foundation built by German POWs once had an elegant kneeling woman holding a platter. Three frogs positioned on the edge of the fountain sprayed water onto the platter.

At the end of the path, in a small circular clearing, there is the remnants of the Kneeling Lady Fountain, an elaborate construction that once featured a kneeling woman on a pedestal holding a platter. A photo in the museum shows an artistic creation, a Greek-like woman in the middle of a pool, with three cement frogs that spouted water onto the platter she held. An exhibit case in the museum holds portions of the frogs. If you try, you may very well hear trickling water and the spray from the frogs.

Features such as this were uncovered by Mike Waters, a Texas A&M anthropology professor who has explored the site and wrote a book about the camp, “Lone Star Stalag.” His work helped inspire Cathy Lazarus, a retired pharmacist who led the creation of Roll Call, Friends of Camp Hearne, the nonprofit organization that opened in the museum in 2011 with community support. The museum preserves the history of the POW camp. It is well worth the trip, especially if Freemen and Lazarus provide you a personal tour. Learn more about the museum on its website.