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Jewish POWs tell of Nazi horrors untold By LENNIE BENNETT © St. Petersburg Times, published May 6, 1998 T. PETERSBURG -- History, as it's written in books, is the sweep of armies, the rise and fall of nations. For Bernie Melnick, history is the morning of Dec. 16, 1944, in the cellar of a farmhouse in Munshausen, Luxembourg, when his world exploded. On that day, Melnick was a 20-year-old U.S. soldier with the cannon company in the 110th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Division. History books record that his division participated in World War II's Battle of the Bulge, a bloody but successful rebuff of Adolf Hitler's final attempt to push through Allied lines. Melnick's personal history is that a German shell hit his cannon, killing his comrades above ground. "I was lucky. It was my turn to bring up another round from the cellar," he said. "I was knocked backwards by the explosion, then I ran upstairs and the Germans began firing at me. I jumped into a well, and they pointed their machine guns at me. I don't know why they didn't kill me. "Instead, they lowered the bucket." Bernie Melnick, private first class, was a prisoner of war. A few days ago, more than 100 men came to the Tampa Bay area for a POW reunion, the 11th annual gathering of survivors of Stalags 9A, 9B and Berga am Elster. Stalags 9A and 9B were POW camps in Germany, draconian but nominally conforming to Geneva Convention rules. Berga was a slave labor camp for European Jews never meant for American GIs, even though Melnick, who is Jewish, and several hundred other Americans ended up there. Melnick, 74, Sanford Lubinsky, Gerald Zimand and Morton Brooks are among only 50 men still alive to tell about what happened at Berga. Melnick and other survivors toured the Tampa Bay Holocaust Memorial Museum and Educational Center. A story seldom if ever told over the past half century slowly spilled out, of Jewish GIs who barely survived the Holocaust. The Longest Day For months, the Germans relied on men shipped in from Buchenwald, but conditions took their toll on that work force and the Germans, desperate, sought another source. They turned to Bad Orb. Bad Orb, in peacetime, was known as a recreational spa. For practical reasons, or ironic ones, it became a prisoner of war camp that housed hundreds of American GIs. Melnick arrived there Dec. 21. In late January 1945, by going through names on rolls and conducting physical examinations, the guards were able to identify about 150 Jewish soldiers, including Melnick, Lubinsky, Zimand and Brooks, who were locked in a warehouse overnight. "It was the longest night of my life," said Melnick. "I thought I was going to die." Instead, the next day, they were stuffed into boxcars with a group that now included Christian soldiers to fill out the 350-man quota needed for a work party. At the Holocaust museum, Gerald Zimand looks down from a balcony at the boxcar, the museum's centerpiece exhibit. He points at the small slit at one end, the only opening in the car. "You know what that slit was for?" he asks. "The guards would urinate into their helmets, then empty them into the boxcar onto us." Zimand, now 77, was 22 when he arrived at Berga. "We worked 12-hour shifts. We were given a loaf of bread each day to divide between seven of us. You know how we made sure it was divided fairly? The guy who cut the bread got the last piece. That's a POW idiosyncrasy. We lived like animals. We became animals. But we never stole food from each other." Zimand, to this day, cannot leave a scrap of food on a plate at meal's end. "It's another POW idiosyncrasy," he said. Sanford Lubinsky, 80, won't discuss the tunnel. "The things that happened down in the tunnel, the things they did, I still can't talk about," Lubinsky said. Brooks remembers the cold. "It was one of the coldest winters in Germany," he said. We had no blankets. Just a burlap bag stuffed with straw for a mattress, infested with lice." The Death March In mid-April, as far as history was concerned, the European war was over, needing only capitulation from Hitler to make it official. The SS guards at Berga knew it. Melnick, Zimand, Lubinsky and Brooks did not. On April 14, the American GIs at Berga were evacuated. Snow was still on the ground, and many soldiers no longer had shoes or coats. For two weeks, the surviving men and a few remaining guards walked along obscure roads with a goal of avoiding advancing American and Russian troops. At night they slept in barns. Brooks says that men who were too weak to go on were left outside in the cold overnight to freeze to death. For Melnick, liberation came quietly April 28, 1945, when his group ran into the 357th Regiment of the 90th Division outside Flossenburg. The guards surrendered without a struggle. Melnick was past caring, in shock and unable to speak, simply walking from habit. By early May, Melnick was in a hospital in England, where his still-festering leg and back wounds were medicated and he received three shock treatments. He was sent home in July. "My wounds were healed, but I was a walking zombie. It took 41/2 years to find myself. "In 1951, two things happened to me. I decided to make a career in the post office. And I met a fine girl. "Everybody had a different way of coming back to life." Said Brooks, "I became a psychologist. It helped me understand human behavior, to make some sense of it." Promises to Keep For decades, as if by common agreement, the men who came home from Berga never talked about what had happened, even to their families. "Nobody wanted to hear about it," said Zimand. "Even the (German) officers in charge got off." Mitchell Bard, executive director of the American Israeli Cooperative Experience, who wrote Forgotten Victims, The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler's Camps, published by Westview Press in 1994, said that Berga's commandant and assistant commandant were convicted and sentenced to death at Nuremberg, but their sentences were commuted to time served and they were released. "I can't find any good reason why the U.S. government would have done that," Bard said. "These men suffered the highest percentage fatality rate in any camp. Twenty percent of them died. For almost 50 years, most of this was covered up." Five years ago, Morton Brooks was asked to speak to students about his war experiences. He had never discussed Berga with anyone. "I found myself recalling it to them," he said. "It was a wrenching experience. For years, no one wanted to believe it. But I wanted to finally get on with my life. "I was a survivor and I felt I owed something to those who didn't come back." About that time, he and others from Berga began attending the POW reunions, finding each other and sharing their memories. History, Hollywood call During the reunion last week in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Bard came to visit, as did Charles Guggenheim, a PBS film producer who is planning a documentary about the men. They have recorded their memories for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Visual History Foundation, which is compiling a video history of the Holocaust. The German government is negotiating reparations with them. Hollywood producers have made calls. Even as the media now vie to get the facts straight, get the story down as it was, the men from Berga can't help wanting to rewrite it. "I had such a dream the other night," Zimand said to the others on a hotel terrace in Tampa. "We were on the death march, and I had gotten the commandant's gun away from him. I put the barrel into his mouth, ready to fire. Then I took it out and told him, "This is too good for you.' "We gathered around him, taking off our belts. One by one, every took turns beating him. When it came to my turn, I woke up." Business | Citrus | Commentary | Entertainment Hernando | Floridian | Obituaries | Pasco | Sports State | Tampa Bay | World & Nation © Copyright 1998 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.