Honoring the Liberators

This week marked the commemoration of the National Days of Remembrance at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Some 120 World War II veterans in their 80s and 90s, wearing tags that said "LIBERATOR," came to be together, to be honored, and to remember.

I am familiar with the story of the liberation of Ebensee, Austria, where soldiers from the 3rd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron had done advance scouting for the 80th Infantry Division and discovered the camp while the chimneys were still smoking from the burning of bodies. It was filled with piles of the dead and emaciated, dazed prisoners.

As an officer in the 80th, my father had gone to see the newly liberated concentration camp at Ebensee. He later said that, "In a way, it was worse than combat. I saw wounded in combat, of course, who were in terrible shape, but this was really bad. The smell of it was so overpowering....I didn't know why I'd come. I was sorry I had. It was so devastating, so depressing. Frightening, really."

Annie Gowen, writing for the Washington Post last Thursday, April 15, in an article titled, Remembering the Atrocities of World War II, wrote about Army nurse Dorothy Pecora, now 90 and living in McLean, Virginia, near Washington. Ms. Pecora brought photos to the Museum that she had carefully preserved, and she spoke of the prisoners she tended at Ebensee. I immediately thought of Lieutenant Jeannie Davis, another Army nurse whom I interviewed for my book. They may well have been in the same unit, the 139th Evacuation Hospital. Here's what I wrote in my book when I interviewed Davis:

Her job, along with the doctors and medical technicians, was to get the inmates ready to evacuate to a regular hospital. The men went up to the camp first but a full week passed before they allowed the nurses to go....

When we did go to the camp, and when I think of this, it was so idiotic — we took tablecloths up there. We thought we would try to make it pleasant for them. They had old wooden tables and they were bringing up better food for them. Of course, they were starving to death. They were in bunks, and they were still lying there, many of them dead. Every five minutes somebody would die, even weeks after liberation. It was so awful and there we were, these silly little nurses, putting tablecloths around.

But it didn't shock us as much as others who were not nurses. Through our training, we'd seen everything. The fact that it was done deliberately, in such mass, was what made it different. But we were able to talk to them and stand next to the bunks. I can think of women I know who couldn't possibly have done that, but we could.

Her humility, courage and confidence come through in those comments. I think the nurses are really the unsung heroines of wartime.

As I read through Gowen's article yesterday, it struck me that Dorothy Pecora, from McLean, Virginia, may well have crossed paths with my father. Since he lived in McLean himself for nearly fifty years, perhaps they stood next to one another in the line at the grocery store or the post office. Maybe they chatted about the weather or the rising price of postage, without ever knowing they shared this awful piece of history.

The arch marks the entrance to what remains of the camp at Ebensee. Houses have been built where the camp stood.