The soldiers of color who freed concentration camps 80 years ago
Why it matters: The Pentagon recently purged references to soldiers of color from its websites, per an order by President Trump. But civil rights advocates say the liberators warrant recognition for their service at a time when many returned home to discrimination, segregation and racial violence.
The big picture: U.S. forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945 — the first of many camps to be freed on the western front from April to May.
It's unclear how many soldiers of color were involved. But evidence collected during the past 25 years indicates that many who helped liberate camps where Jews were imprisoned were themselves in racially segregated military units.
Robert Williams of the USC Shoah Foundation, a group that preserves survivor testimonies of the Holocaust, tells Axios the soldiers' actions at the camps and throughout the war speak volumes today, amid the nation's rising antisemitism and distrust between some groups.
Zoom in: Holocaust museums and civil rights projects have been racing to collect oral histories, memoirs and family statements to piece together this overlooked part of the liberation story.
The USC Shoah Foundation, the Voces Oral History Center at the University of Texas, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem in Israel are among those that have collected testimonies of survivors and liberators.
The liberators "were not only willing to fight, but eager to fight for the liberal democratic ideals of the United States, despite facing oppression of racism and marginalization at home," Williams says.
What they're saying: "I closed my eyes and waited to be shot. Then, I heard him speak English," Dachau survivor Solly Ganor said in a 1993 interview, recalling when soldiers in a Jeep found him in the snow.
Ganor recalled looking up and seeing Asian "angels. ... I didn't know what to make of this."
One of the men who found the teenaged Ganor was Clarence Matsumura, a Japanese American soldier in the segregated 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, which was made up of Asian Americans from the West Coast and Hawaii. Matsumura wrapped Ganor in a blanket and carried him to safety, saving his life.
Johnnie Meza Marino, a Mexican American soldier from Texas, told The Voces Oral History Center in 2001 that his unit liberated the Hadamar and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps in Germany.
Marino, who died in 2015, recalled that as his unit approached more camps, he noticed dust flakes falling on his uniform — from the tall chimney of one of the camps' crematoriums.
Another soldier recalled how being a liberator affected him.
"When I entered the Bushenwald concentration camp, I was an angry Black soldier," Leon Bass, who died in 2015, recalled in his 2011 memoir."My blinders had come off ... I now understood that human suffering was not relegated to just me."
Zoom out: More than 1.5 million soldiers of color served during World War II in the European and Pacific theaters. Black and Asian American service members were forced to serve in segregated units.
Japanese American soldiers served while their families back home were forced into detention camps. Mexican American and Native American soldiers served with white soldiers but often faced intense discrimination.
Their experiences led some of the soldiers to work for civil rights once they returned home, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, founder and director of The Voces Oral History Center, tells Axios.
"When you were able to see human beings as human beings, and see our common humanity, then I think that you don't just advocate for opportunities for your own group," Rivas-Rodriguez said.
The experience would plague others, such as Jack Bushyhead, a member of the Cherokee Nation and who took part in the liberation of Dachau on April 29, 1945.
Visions of the starved victims Bushyhead saw on the Nazis' "death train" haunted him until his death in 1977.
"When he was inebriated, he would even see these people — he called them the little people,'' his daughter, Jaxine Bushyhead Gasper, told the Boston Globe in 2001. ''He just drank himself to death. I don't think Dad ever got over the war.''
Others would go on to speak out against antisemitism and help create local Holocaust museums.
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Los Angeles Times
a day ago
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When the going gets tough for L.A., our city rallies like no other
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Indigenous people from across Southern California and beyond gathered under its shade for special councils and to meet with its caretakers, the residents of the village of Yaanga. It was an awe-inspiring sight for the pobladores who came from Mexico in 1789 and set up El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in the name of the Spanish crown. The sycamore — now bearing the name El Aliso — appears as a towering black splotch in the first known photo of Los Angeles, shot in the early 1860s when the city was in the process of turning from a Mexican village into an American town. When El Aliso was finally chopped down in 1895, felled by brewery owners who inadvertently killed the giant after cutting off too many limbs and paving over its roots, residents took chips from it as a memento mori of sorts. But El Aliso never truly died. It lived on in the history books but especially in the memory of the descendants of the people who had seen the sycamore grow from a seed to a giant. 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Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
Food for all over security for some
My grandmother escaped the Warsaw ghetto after her first of four sisters died from hunger. She slipped through a few missing bricks in the wall that sealed the Jewish population away from their Aryan neighbors, where they were trapped in poverty and malnourishment and subject to Nazi plans for extermination. Scholars report that 92,000 Jews died of starvation in the ghetto before 300,000 were deported to camps. After escaping, my grandmother — just a teenager — snuck food to her family several times before the rest of her family died, and my grandmother stayed hungry for many years, as she survived the Holocaust on her own. 'When you hungry, you soul flies out,' Bubbe, as I called her, said in her testimony of survival. Bubbe is most tragically poetic in her descriptions of hunger, and she never forgot the way her sister died asking for a piece of bread, just a shtickle fun broyt. Bulging eyes and blue lips. My grandmother's relationship to food was forever marked by the ghost of hunger. Once she was living safely in the American suburbs, she was never without a loaf of rye bread in the freezer. My grandmother knew about the essential dignity of every human being. At the end of the war, when she was liberated by the Russians in the Polish city of Lukov, she noticed the German soldiers walking around without boots, and she felt sad for them. 'You see a person is hurt,' she said, 'you want to help.' How we respond to the needs of those around us — this is what forms the basis of our character. In drawing a book about my grandmother's story, I thought often about the psychologist Abraham Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs.' At the bottom of the pyramid is our basic physiology, our need for food and water, and above that our need for security and safety. Only when these needs are met, can we focus on higher planes, seeking belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization. It is only because my grandparents fought so hard, endured so much, for their bread that I am in a position to reflect on what my grandmother's struggle for survival means for my identity, my sense of meaning and my politics. Her legacy taught me that every group of people deserves to live free from hunger and fear of violence in their homes, that we all need bread and boots. She taught me that we should tell the stories, all stories, of exile and loss and persecution. She taught me to love and believe in America, and that the Jews of the world are safest in liberal democracies, with governments that grant equal opportunity for all in their jurisdiction. As I learned more about Jewish history, I came to believe that the long story of Jewish suffering resulted in an attempt to solve 'the Jewish Problem' by creating a Palestinian Problem, that the Israeli government has never sufficiently reckoned with its role in Palestinian persecution, and that the fate of Palestinians and Israelis is, consequently, forever linked, and therefore the only viable future for either peoples lies in the two learning to break bread together. I can more easily imagine this future because I — unlike my grandmother, unlike my Jewish cousins in Israel, and unlike all Palestinians living under occupation — have not feared for basic survival. But those who've lost more than I have share this vision. And I believe it's my duty, at the very least, to hold on to my imagination. But in the face of hunger, words and ideas begin to melt, then evaporate. Hunger is stupifying. The mounting starvation statistics in Gaza change daily, and they are all bad. In May, 5,000 children diagnosed with malnutrition. A 24-hour period with 19 deaths from starvation. At least 1,400 people have been killed in Gaza while trying to access food since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an opaquely funded American and Israeli organization that 25 experts have called an 'insult to the humanitarian enterprise and standards,' began dominating distribution of aid in the Gaza Strip, in the name of diverting food from Hamas. The blockade, the system of severe restrictions on the movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza, has halted the flow of food and medical supplies, and frequent breakdowns in telecommunications have severely challenged the efforts to distribute what aid does get in. Outside of Gaza, we are in a position to quibble about statistics and argue about what words we use to describe other people's suffering. Many scholars have called the constant killings, the reduction of Palestinian infrastructure to rubble and the systematic blockade of humanitarian aid a genocide. For many Jewish people with direct connections to the Holocaust, the story of genocide is so total, so unimaginable, it's hard to reconcile a word with such totemic power with something happening right now, in front of our eyes, on our phones. Yet some Jewish Holocaust survivors identify with the images of Gaza's destruction and feel compelled to use the strongest language available in condemnation. Others use the terms ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity, while some just want to call this a war. These distinctions matter; a designation of genocide would, theoretically, oblige the international community to act, with sanctions or criminal prosecution for those responsible. But this semantic dialogue can produce a kind of blank despair. Starving children make fine distinctions feel hollow. The Israeli government claims there is 'no starvation' in Gaza, even as officials have moved to address this starvation in response to international and internal pressure, with pauses in fighting and minimal air drops. Israel's defenders admit there is a starvation problem in Gaza, but blame Hamas and Hamas-infiltrated international organizations for looting humanitarian aid, a claim that has been widely debunked. The Israeli government says this is a war of defense. This is the logic that has led, for example, to the siege of Gaza's already limited clean water supply. We can acknowledge the violence, the constant fear and the deep disappointment both peoples have experienced for decades, without equating these experiences, all the while seeing the moral imperative clearly: Food and water for all must come before security for some, all of which must come before ideology. This formulation implies that those wielding the most resources, Israeli and American institutions, must be willing to sacrifice some security in the name of ensuring hungry people are fed. There's no future for Israelis or Palestinians in which one people's security comes before another people's basic physiological needs, in wartime or after. All of us attending to the news today are squinting through intergenerational memories. I've looked at pictures of starving Gazans and been swept back to the Polish ghetto I never lived in, watching a family member die. I've seen Jewish people I love walk freely down the streets of American cities and perceive menace in symbols of Palestinian liberation they don't understand. I've listened to panicked complaints from Jewish acquaintances about how loud the sirens are at protests in front of Israeli embassies. To them, perhaps the sirens feel like war planes. The thing about those of us living at the top of Maslow's hierarchy is that sometimes we fall through loopholes and touch the panic of basic survival, bringing our identities, and our politics, with us. We can have compassion for each other in these moments. But we must anchor ourselves with these facts: At this point, in Gaza, some people aren't eating. This is why so many around the world are crying out and risking their safety and their status to protest. Our intergenerational grief should lead us all to cry together, in the name of those most vulnerable. Artists and activists don't have perfect plans for solving the most complex political crises of our lifetimes, and we don't command armies or wield many resources. What we can do is cry. We can cry about what is deeply wrong with now, and we can use our imaginations to light the way forward. Where our imaginations fixate might guide our collective priorities. So I imagine the children of Palestine in my drawings. They are breaking bread with my grandmother's sisters, if only in my imagination. Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of 'Artificial: A Love Story' and 'Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir.'
