A single day at Dachau binds their lives forever

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A single day at Dachau binds their lives forever

Article by: JOANN LOVIGLIO , Associated Press
Updated: March 4, 2012 - 9:17 PM

The survivor and the liberator consider it their duty to talk about the Holocaust.

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Ernie Gross, left, was nearly worked to death for several years at Auschwitz before being sent to Dachau and freed there by U.S. troops. Don Greenbaum, right, was among those liberators.

Photo: Matt Rourke, Associated Press

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PHILADELPHIA - The way Ernie Gross and Don Greenbaum laugh with the ease of old friends, it's easy to assume the dapper octogenarians have known each other forever.

In reality, they met only a few months ago. Their familiarity doesn't come from shared memories of a childhood playground or a high school dance but a far darker place: Both men spent a single day at the Dachau concentration camp on the day its 30,000 prisoners were liberated by American GIs in 1945.

Greenbaum, 87, and Gross, 83, don't think they met that day, but nevertheless share a bond. They met after Gross, who lives in Philadelphia, saw a mention in a local newspaper last November about Greenbaum, a Philadelphia native now living in suburban Bala Cynwyd. "Ernie wanted to thank me for saving his life, quote unquote, even though there were 50,000 other men there with me," Greenbaum said, with a hint of unease.

They were both wrong

Gross, then all of 85 pounds after nearly a year of sickness, abuse and constant hunger, had no doubt that April 29, 1945, was his last day on Earth. Greenbaum, a soldier with Gen. George Patton's Third Army, arrived that day at Dachau expecting to seize ammunition, clothing and food that was kept for the Nazis' SS forces. They were both wrong.

The men, who talk about their experiences at local synagogues and schools, now are working together to find other Dachau survivors and liberators in the area to share their stories.

"As we got near Dachau, about a mile outside the camp, there was an odor we couldn't identify," Greenbaum said. "When we arrived, I saw the boxcars. They were full of bodies."

History would come to call it the Dachau death train: about 40 cattle cars holding more than 2,000 men and women evacuated from another camp -- and left to die on the train.

"We had at that time never heard the expression 'concentration camp,'" Greenbaum said.

Gross, a Romanian Jew, was 15 when he and his family were taken from their home, deported to a ghetto in Hungary and eventually packed in a boxcar to Auschwitz in 1942. At the urging of a man next to him as they waited in line to be processed, he lied and told the SS officer he was 17. Any younger and he'd be deemed incapable of hard labor and, he was told, immediately killed.

"The same guy who told me to lie said to me, 'Do you see that smoke in the sky where the sun cannot get through? This is going to be your parents in about two hours," he recalled. "My parents and younger brother and younger sister ... that's the last time I saw them."

In a state of starvation, and after years of beatings and backbreaking work, then-16-year-old Gross was shoved into another boxcar, this time headed to Dachau. It was supposed to arrive a day before the liberation, on April 28, 1945, but American bombings delayed the train. When he arrived the next day, Gross knew he would soon be murdered: hanged, shot, gassed, he didn't know.

'Running away'

"We were standing in this long line and we already knew where we were going," he said. "I was close enough that I could see the crematorium and, all of a sudden, I see the German soldiers throwing down their guns and running away."

The first contingent of Americans had arrived.

"If they would have come an hour later, I would not be here to tell this story," Gross said.

Greenbaum said his company arrived shortly after the first wave of American troops and spent only a couple of hours at Dachau before moving on to their next mission. The SS men at Dachau were captured, killed or in hiding by the time he arrived.

"We met a priest there who took us through the camp. He showed us what was there; the prisoners were walking skeletons," he said. "We called the troop behind us to notify them about what we had come across and to bring food and clothing and blankets and the whole bit. Then we left. We had to keep going."

After the war, Gross emigrated to Philadelphia, where he ended up owning three delis. Greenbaum, whose military career also included the Battle of the Bulge and a Purple Heart, returned home and went about his life.

Then he saw a Holocaust denier on television 20 years ago. "That motivated me to speak because I saw what happened," he said. "This fellow's on TV saying it never happened. I was there and I saw it. Ernie and I, we both were there ... we know."