This town, and a man
came up to us and said: "There's a factory
about a mile down the road, "and you will find
a lot of Jewish women in there "that were dropped there,
and there's SS guarding them, "SS men and SS women." So we raced down there,
two of us in a jeep, and a long, stretched building,
a shed, I would call it. We opened this shed,
we went in there... And you saw women on the floor,
on wooden pallets. When I say women,
you saw skeletons, you saw... You didn't know whether men or women
or children, there were... unbelievable views, I mean, no hair,
they were all shorn on their heads, rags hanging on them, no shoes, bones instead of faces
and the stench was so horrible... It's hard to describe. When we found them, unfortunately many of the GI friends of mine
gave them food, which was the worst thing to do. Their stomachs were shriveled
into nothing and we lost at least another 40
during the first night that were too far gone, and I don't say the food killed them, I'm not saying
they wouldn't have died anyway, but this is what happened. The army did not help. We found these women, but army policy was
that these were displaced persons. We had no jurisdiction over them. We had to wait until UNRRA, which was the beginning
of the United Nations relief organizations, took care of them. Every day counted. All these matters would have taken
another month, two months. Bureaucracy takes a long time, so the only way those women survived
was by people like myself and about five-six other
Jewish GIs, officers, took matters into our own hands. There was a hospital in town,
a German field hospital, and I went down there and a colonel confronted me. He was the prototype,
if you can think of it, of Colonel Klink, a doctor, and I said: "We would like
half the hospital evacuated "so we can bring these women in." He said: "I stand on the Geneva convention,
I will not move my wounded. "We have people with..."
Amputees and so on, German soldiers. So I grabbed him by the neck and I took him in the jeep
down to the shed. I said: "Here's your Geneva convention. "Now you've got one hour
to clean out the hospital." In one hour they were all out. We took the women into the hospital. Little by little, they could only
put two stretchers on the jeep.
