The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsh

because, of all things, he played drums and piano and the unit’s band was looking for musicians. He played at Newport News, he played at Camp Gordon, Georgia, he played in Nashville and the Mojave Desert. He wasn’t playing on the Susan B. Anthony on the way to Omaha Beach at H-Hour when the ship hit a mine. His unit lost all its equipment as the captain balanced the ship by having the troops on board move from side to side, and eventually Sunshine ended up on an English vessel with “no helmet, no guns, no nothing,” and they watched the Anthony sink. He thought they’d take him back to England, but instead he and a few of his guys were dumped on Utah Beach. It took almost three weeks before his unit was put back together again and took off on the great march across Europe, where they eventually built the first bridge across the Rhine.

    Morris Sunshine was part of the 294th Combat Engineer Battalion attached to the 104th Infantry Division when Nordhausen was liberated. He says the sight was indescribable and the smell was unimaginable .
    Back in Brooklyn before the war, he’d heard stories about the Germans from people they called refugees who spoke about prisons that they’d come from. But he knew nothing about concentration camps. On the morning of April 12, they began to smell Nordhausen from ten or fifteen miles away. And then they arrived at the camp, which he recalls as being adjacent to the road, next to the town. “We saw these skeletonlike people, dressed in the striped uniforms, and some of them moved. Some of them didn’t move. It was a shocking sight. This was some kind of something that’s indescribable, you know. And the smell—it was horrible, such a horrible smell of death that hasn’t been put into the ground, it’s unimaginable.
    “I do remember that some of these people got out, and they wandered into some of the German houses looking for food. I was a buck-ass sergeant, and [the Germans] came out looking for me ‘cause I spoke Yiddish, and I was able to converse with these people. And they told me that there were some people in this house, and the woman of the house is screaming and yelling, panicking. I went in, and what the story was, the member of the concentration camp, there was bread on the table and he grabbed it. And she was screaming at him that ‘This is for my family!’ and she was appealing to me that I should get the bread from the concentration camp guy, which, of course, I didn’t have any sympathy for her at all.
    “I mean, I was so angry at what you saw, and the depravity. Some of them couldn’t walk. [They ate] whatever we gave them, some of them threw up; it was too much for their stomach to take. But this—of course we didn’t know at the time. We found that out in a day or so, two days—they were collapsing on us.”
    Sunshine went into the yard at Nordhausen where hundreds of bodies lay because he was curious. He wanted to know who the people were, what they were doing. “Most of them could not speak; it was kind of an unintelligent gibberish to me. They might not have been speaking German. Could have been speaking Russian or Hungarian or anything like that. But I didn’t know that. I just went at them with my Deutsche.
    “I did get that they had been captured. The story I got was the German guards knew that we were coming—how they knew that, I don’t know, but they knew it. And [the guards] tried to get gasoline, kerosene to burn some of the camp and some of the victims. Somehow, some of these internees, the concentration camp victims, were able to overpower some of these guards, which to me sounds strange, because they had such little strength. But evidently, something like that did happen, and they beat up on a few of them and they never got to fire up the camp.”
    John Rheney, Jr., was a staff sergeant, a rifle squad leader in the 413th Infantry Regiment of the Timberwolves. After the war, Rheney spent forty years as a pediatrician. He’s now