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An American Rabbi Enters Buchenwald

(Jerusalem Post) Rafael Medoff - On April 11, 1945, U.S. Army chaplain Herschel Schacter was on the outskirts of Weimar, Germany, when he was told, "We just got word that our troops penetrated a place called Buchenwald. It's some kind of concentration camp." Schacter and his assistant, Pvt. Hyman Schulman, drove five miles to the site. As he stepped through the front gate, his eye "caught a glimpse of a tall chimney with billowing smoke still curling upward." It was Buchenwald's crematorium. Schacter later recalled, "There I stood, face to face with piles of dead bodies strewn around, waiting to be shoveled into the furnace that was still hot." A GI led the rabbi to a nearby prisoner barracks. "A foul odor hit me as I entered. I saw a series of shelves, hard cold planks of wood from floor to ceiling. There were hundreds of men and a few boys lying on stinking straw sacks, looking out at me from dazed and bewildered eyes, skin and bones, more dead than alive....Impulsively, instinctively, I shouted in Yiddish, 'Sholom aleichem Yidden, ihr zeit frei - Greetings, Jews, you are free!'" Some 21,000 Jews remained alive in Buchenwald on its day of liberation. Prisoner Moshe Avital later recalled, "We crowded around him [Rabbi Schacter] and hugged and kissed him. And some asked him, 'Why did you take so long to come?'" At one point, Schacter found himself "paralyzed in front of a mound of corpses." He noticed a small movement from among the bodies and stepped closer. The eyes of a young boy stared out at him. The 8-year-old boy, known as "Lulek," was Israel Meir Lau, who grew up to become the chief rabbi of Israel. With the permission of his superiors, Schacter returned to Buchenwald every day for the next 2 1/2 months, nursing the survivors back to life and serving as their liaison to the military authorities. The writer is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington.
2020-05-15 00:00:00
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