Try to forget or try to remember?
Confronting the nightmares of the Holocaust

by Joe Zentis

In some ways, World War II veteran Raymond Bartolo was one of the lucky ones. Unlike 484,375 Americans who were killed or listed as missing – including his younger brother Eddie - he made it home alive. But he brought back, deep within his mind, ghosts that would haunt him for the next fifty years.

When he was sent to Europe early in 1945, Bartolo was just 19 years old. He was a soldier in an artillery battalion of the newly reactivated 97 th Infantry Division. They had completed training in the United States for deployment to the Pacific, but were diverted to Europe to help counterattack Germany 's last desperate offensive – the Battle of the Bulge.

After the Germans were pushed back into Germany , the 97 th Division was sent into southern Germany . They quickly advanced all the way to the Czechoslovakian border.

That's where Bartolo turned out to be not so lucky. He was part of a team of four whose job was to lay telephone wire from forward observer positions on the front lines to artillery guns about a mile back. On April 23, 1945, while returning from a routine mission, they chanced upon a small contingent of American troops trying to break into a huge walled compound.

None of these young soldiers had even heard the term concentration camp. The name Flossenburg meant nothing to them. They had no idea that they were about to come face to face with one of the worst nightmares in human history: a hell where Jews and other prisoners, including Germans opposed to Hitler, were used as slave labor - and beaten, starved, tortured, and incinerated.

“There was a group of about eight or nine guys from the 90 th Division,” Bartolo said. “We found them in front of what we later found out was the administration building, trying to break into this gate. So we went up to find out what was happening.”

There was no resistance from within. Behind the administration building, the soldiers discovered a large courtyard. It was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. They could see inmates inside, back away from the fence. The Americans heard them shout warnings not to touch the fence because it was charged with electricity.

“So we broke into the gate, and of course the people went berserk because they recognized we were American troops and not Germans,” Bartolo said. “We tried to calm them down. All we could hear were the words ‘free' and ‘Americans.' We didn't know what to do. Here we were confronted with maybe three or four thousand people, and there were only about ten or fifteen of us.”

What they had discovered was literally unbelievable.

“It was an ugly sight, Bartolo said. It's something that can't be erased from my mind. There's no way to explain what we saw. You've probably seen pictures of people that were in the concentration camps, but you actually had to see it to know what really happened. If you can visualize human skeletons covered with skin, that's what these people looked like. Their eyeballs were sunken way in. They were all dark. It was all from malnutrition.”

The soldiers gave the prisoners the little food they had with them – combat rations and some candy.

“As soon as they got it down,” Bartolo said, “it would just come right back up again. They were so starved they'd try to gulp it down as fast as they could. It was almost as if they were afraid somebody would take it from them.”

It wasn't long until convoys arrived from the 90 th and 97 th Divisions with food and medical assistance.

One inmate, a Polish Jew, was a doctor who spoke English. He took Bartolo and his companions on a tour of the camp. There were rows upon rows of barracks, enough to house 7,000 prisoners. Each building was about 75 feet long, with an aisle down one side. Along the other side were cubicles stacked three high, with space in each to sleep four people.

The doctor said there were usually not 7,000 inmates, but 14,000 or more. Everyone worked 12 hour shifts in an airplane factory or a nearby quarry. While half the prisoners worked, the other half were in the barracks.

When the Americans entered the camp, most of the barracks were empty. Bartolo found out later that the Nazis abandoned the camp when they learned American troops were getting near. They took most of the inmates – perhaps 15,000 - on foot or in trains to other prisons. The weaker ones were left locked inside the compound.

“He took us into one of the barracks that the prisoners were still in,” Bartolo said. “They didn't even know that we had liberated the camp. When we saw the conditions of the people that were in these cubicles, the condition was something that was imprinted on my mind ever since 1945.”

At the back of the camp, the doctor showed them a narrow gauge railroad running out through the prison wall. It had been used to haul dead and dying prisoners to the crematory.

Finally, the doctor took the Americans to the crematory itself. He showed them the wall where the Nazis shot the prisoners who weren't already dead when they got.

The crematory had six ovens. When there were too many dead inmates, the Nazis piled their bodies up outside the crematory, soaked with fuel, and burned them right there.

Beside the crematory was a pit, about six feet in diameter and six feet deep. It was full of the ashes of the dead. The doctor said that this was the second time the pit had been filled.

“You can hold the ashes of a cremated person in your two hands,” Bartolo said, “so you can imagine how many people had died in Flossenburg.”

Barely two weeks after the liberation of Flossenburg , Germany surrendered. The 97 th Infantry Division was sent back to the United States to be outfitted for the invasion of Japan . They were in a convoy of ships crossing the Pacific when Japan surrendered, so they became part of the army of occupation.

But the horror of war was not over for Raymond Bartolo – not even after he was discharged from the service on February 25, 1945. When he arrived home, he had to help his parents cope with the loss of his brother.

“When I left for the service, Dad's hair was as black as coal,” Bartolo said. “This was three years later, his hair was white as snow – mainly from losing my brother Eddie.”

While trying to adjust to the absence of their younger son, the family had to deal with Bartolo's problems: recurring nightmares relating to his encounter with the horrors of Flossenburg.

“I had nightmares over this continually. My folks thought I was going nuts for a long time, because I would have these periodically, waking up screaming, and they didn't know what was going on. And they would ask me about them, and I just didn't ever want to tell them about what I saw because it was hard to try to tell anybody.”

Bartolo's nightmares recurred for 50 years.

“It was after 1995, the 50 th anniversary of the liberation of Flossenburg,” Bartolo said, “that everybody started to open up, because all this stuff was sort of kept hidden, or repressed. I got to meet about eight survivors of the camp that live in Pittsburgh .”

His conversations with them allowed Bartolo to face his demons - the repressed memories that caused his nightmares. He decided to join his new friends in their efforts to make sure such atrocities would never happen again. Having tried for fifty years to forget about Flossenburg, Bartolo started to do whatever he could to make sure that the horrors of the Holocaust would always be remembered.

He learned everything he could, not only about Flossenburg, but also about the other concentration and extermination camps – Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbruch, and Belsenburg, to name just a few. The Nazis had built more than 100 of them. Then he began giving talks to high school kids, service groups, Lions Clubs, and Kiwanis Clubs.

“The people in this country are very lucky,” Bartolo said. “They've never really gone through a war, outside of the service people. They really don't know what a war is about, and I hope they never have to get into a war, because it's not all honor and glory. There's a lot of grief, a lot of suffering, and a lot of misery to war. There's a quote I use – I don't remember who said it or where I heard it: ‘To know the horrors of war is to want peace.' And that's the way I end up my talks.”

Bartolo is always impressed with the response to his presentations, especially in schools.

“Talking to the kids in school, sometimes when you get maybe 200 or more in an auditorium, you know how rowdy it is, but when you start talking about the holocaust you can here a pin drop. That's how much interest they show in it,” Bartolo said.

After his listeners see what horrific things the Nazis did to their prisoners, they almost always ask one particular question. Does he hate the Germans?

“I tell them we have too much hate and destruction in the world today. We don't have enough love and compassion.”

One of his most important talks was before an audience of only two – an interviewer and a camera man at his home in Greenville , Pennsylvania . It was part of a project to record the remembrances of people who had personally experienced the Holocaust. The tape is now a permanent part of the Holocaust Museum in Washington , DC .

After the interview, Bartolo received a thank you letter that sums up his contribution:

“In sharing your personal testimony as a liberator of the Holocaust, you have granted future generations the opportunity to experience a personal connection with history. Your interview will be carefully preserved as an important part of the most comprehensive library of testimonies ever collected. Far into the future, people will be able to see a face, hear a voice, and observe a life so that they may listen and learn, and always remember. Thank you for your invaluable contribution, your strength, and your generosity of spirit.”

The letter was signed by the chairman of the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, Stephen Spielberg, Academy Award winning director of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan .

Sidebar: Facts about Flossenburg

Flossenburg was established in 1938 as a prison for criminals and “asocial” people, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, and homosexuals. The population soon included German political prisoners and foreign prisoners of war, as well as Jews from conquered European countries, such as Hungary and Poland .

At its peak, Flossenburg housed 17,000 prisoners in barracks built to hold 7,000. They worked twelve hour shifts, seven days a week, as slave labor in a Messerschmitt aircraft factory and a nearby quarry. Half the inmates were in the barracks while the other half worked. If anyone became too weak to work, tried to escape, or refused an order, they were exterminated.

Memorials on the site of the camp today state that 74,000 inmates died there. More recent research puts the number in the vicinity of 30,000. At least two of the dead were unidentified American prisoners of war whose plane had been shot down over Germany .

From June 12, 1946, to January 22, 1947, a U.S. Military Court at Dachau tried 46 ex-officials and guards of Flossenburg for war crimes. The court found forty-one of the defendants guilty. Fifteen were sentenced to death, twelve of whom were hanged during October, 1947. The sentences of the other three were later commuted. The rest of the convicted Nazis served various terms of imprisonment.