The-Ave.US

  Although my father entered Buchenwald on the fifth day of Passover, his  pictures and the stories written on the backs of them do not talk about the holiday of liberation.  However, this story from Israel’s Ch. 7 relates much of what Dad must have experienced and raises a new question:  Did my father meet Charlie Payne?  Charlie, then a 20 year old soldier, was to become the great uncle of president Obama!   Sadly. Mr.Payne died in 2014, another hero who now will never get to see my Dad’s pictures or offer his comment’s because of the determination of my brother Hugh Schwartz to “let them rot!”

Like my Dad, Charlie Payne returned with what we would now call post traumatic stress disorder.  President Obama said that when his uncle returned home, “he just went up into the attic and he didn’t leave the house for six months. Now obviously something had really affected him deeply but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”

There were no facilities for my Dad either.  Worse, our part of Boston was then very anti-Semitic and my Dad was threatened that he would be beaten. I still have the “head knocker” cane Robert brought back from Germany and used to threaten the thugs who gathered on our street one night as my father took his evening walk. These thugs ran away from this tough and frightening Jewish ex US Army medic.  Despite this toughness, my father would sometimes wake up at night screaming.

My Dad also talked about his knowing what was happening to the Jews, even though it was not until April 1945 that Stars and Stripes finally published articles about Nazi atrocities and concentration camps, and even then, the articles did not mention Jews. The average GI reading Stars and Strips had no way of knowing that Jews were the main victims of the Nazis.  As the artist Arthur Sztyk said, Europe’s Jews were being “treat[ed] as a pornographical subject–you cannot discuss it in polite society.”

Now, 70 years later,  my siblings want my father’s pictures to rot.

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Among the young GIs who arrived at Ohrdruf was a 20 year-old from Kansas named Charlie Payne. He was the future great uncle of President Barack Obama.

70 years ago this week, On April 4, 1945, the first day of Passover, the 4th Armored Division and the 89th Infantry Division  came across
Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, as they chased the retreating German army. The Nazi guards had already abandoned the camp and forced most of the prisoners to take part in a death march. They left behind piles of emaciated corpses.

Eight days later, General Dwight Eisenhower, together with Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley, visited Ohrdruf.  Eisenhower was so disturbed by what he encountered that he arranged for several delegations of journalists and Members of Congress to view the evidence of Nazi atrocities first hand. “The things I saw beggar description,” he wrote. “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.”

Then-candidate Obama spoke of his great-uncle on the presidential campaign trail in 2008. Urging increased funding for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers, Mr. Obama said that when Charlie returned home, “he just went up into the attic and he didn’t leave the house for six months. Now obviously something had really affected him deeply but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”

The horror that Charlie and his fellow-GIs experienced upon seeing the Nazis’ victims was compounded by the fact that they were completely unprepared for what they were about to see. Although the War Department, in Washington, was fully informed about the Nazis’ mass murder of millions of European Jews, ordinary soldiers were never told what they were likely to see as they made their way through formerly Axis-controlled territory.

Army publications were no help.Considerthe experience of Sgt. Richard Paul, a reporter for Yank, an army magazine for soldiers. In October

Arthur Szyk

1944 –six months before Mr. Obama’s great-uncle entered Ohrdruf– Sgt. Paul submitted an article about the mass murder of the Jews in Auschwitz, The editors of Yank turned it down, saying it was “too Semitic.” They told him to rewrite it so that it “did not deal principally with Jews.”

The army’s other magazine, Stars and Stripes, was no different. It was not until April 1945 that Stars and Stripes finally published articles about Nazi atrocities and concentration camps, and even then, the articles did not mention Jews. The average GI reading Stars and Strips had no way of knowing that Jews were the main victims of the Nazis.

The line followed by Yank and Stars and Stripes was unfortunately consistent with the approach of the Roosevelt administration as a whole. Calling attention to the fact that the Jews were being singled out for persecution would have increased pressure on the U.S. government to grant them refuge–something President Franklin Roosevelt did not want to do.

The chiefs of the U.S. Office of War Information instructed their staff that coverage of the Nazi mass-murders would be “confused and misleading if it appears to be simply affecting the Jewish people.” A meeting of the American, British, and Soviet foreign ministers in Moscow in October 1943 issued a statement threatening postwar punishment for Nazi war crimes against conquered populations. It mentioned “French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages…Cretan peasants…the people of Poland”–but not Jews.

In fact, General Eisenhower himself removed all references to Jews from a leaflet the Allies air-dropped over Europe in September 1944, threatening to punish anyone who collaborated in Nazi atrocities against civilians. Even President Roosevelt’s 1944 message commemorating the first anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt –a rebellion by Jewish fighters– did not mention the Jews.

Arthur Szyk, the famous artist and Holocaust rescue activist, remarked bitterly that Europe’s Jews were being “treat[ed] as a pornographical subject–you cannot discuss it in polite society.”