November 11 and Holocaust memorial events are generally commemorated separately. But for many, these events are inextricably linked.
My father, Chaim, was a Holocaust survivor of the Dachau Concentration Camp, specifically the sub-camp Kaufering, a complex of eleven camps each with thousands of mostly Jewish prisoners. They were used as slave labourers to build underground bunkers to assemble the German jet fighter Messerschmitt Me 262. The living and working conditions were inhumane, and by 1944, typhus was epidemic. Given only 250 calories of food a day, the life expectancy of a Dachau prisoner averaged four months.
Fearing the advance of the Allies, in the last week of April 1945, the evacuation of Dachau began. The Kaufering prisoners were transferred to the main Dachau camp and on April 27, most of the Jewish prisoners, 7,000 -10,000, were forced walking towards the Austrian border. Chaim was one of them.
The viciousness the prisoners endured during the Dachau Death March is unimaginable. Dressed in threadbare striped uniforms, some had wooden shoes, others barefoot, they were paraded through 18 Bavarian towns in Southern Germany. There was no food and they walked 10-15 hours a day in unseasonably cold and wet weather. More than half the Jewish prisoners died or were killed during the Death March.
On the evening of May 1, 1945, my father tells: “We were travelling for three days. They took us in a group to shoot us. We laid down. We laid calmly. It was cold, there was frost at night. When we woke up in the morning, we saw no one. The guards all ran away. We started running and the Americans liberated us.”
That night, in the early hours of May 2, ten centimetres of snow had fallen. The 522nd Field Artillery Battalion of the US Army was travelling towards the Austrian border to capture Hitler's vacation home in Berchtesgaden. Near Waakirchen (64 kilometers south of Dachau), they stumbled upon bodies lying in fields covered in snow; others, like my father, were wandering aimlessly along the highway.
George Oiye building a fire for survivors of the Dachau death march.
The 522nd battalion comprised a segregated, all Japanese American (second generation - Nisei) unit. Many of the Nisei volunteers from the US mainland came from internment camps, set up by the American government for unfounded reasons of national security. When Masao Watanabe was asked (in a 1998 interview for the Densho Encyclopedia) why he volunteered for the US Army, he answered: “I did not know which was worse, being locked up in camps or going to war. In my mind barbed wires aren’t very inviting.”
Historian and curator, Eric Saul, has been studying the Japanese American soldiers in World War II for more than forty years. When interviewing Nisei soldiers in 1981, Saul discovered the Japanese-American soldiers were the liberators of the Dachau Death March Jews. Clarence Matsumura described what he witnessed:
In an open field, we found several hundred prisoners lying, in many cases unable to move. Some were shot, and some were dead from exposure... [We] saw that these people were starving, and we tried to feed them… and they couldn’t take the food. Some of them died in my arms, unable to swallow the food that we had given them. I cried. I still feel guilty to this day…. For the next three days, we camped in the small town of Waakirchen. We worked day and night to carry these ex-prisoners into barns and into buildings.
On May 4, the 522nd battalion was ordered to leave Waakirchen and continue their original mission.
Days before the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion liberated the Death March prisoners, the Nisei soldiers also partook in the liberation of at least two Dachau subcamps; this has largely gone unacknowledged. The Nisei soldiers told Saul they were ordered by their commanding officers to never reveal their part in the liberation of Dachau and the Dachau Death March prisoners. Saul can only speculate that the US command would not allow any public recognition of the Japanese-American soldiers for their heroic service.
The Jews of Dachau were incarcerated for no other reason than being Jewish. They were saved by Japanese American soldiers whose own families were incarcerated for no other reason than being of Japanese ancestry. Months after the end of the war, the Nisei soldiers returned to the US as unsung heroes and helped resettle their families. Forty years after the story of the Nisei soldiers broke, Eric Saul is perplexed by the continued lack of acknowledgement of their remarkable contributions in World War II.
This is such a touching story on so many levels. How amazing that your father survived, and what a shocking parallel. Looking at the conflicts going on around the world, it doesn't seem we've made all that much progress. Thanks for sharing your father's story.
Thank you, Zelda, for sharing this story. It's probably no surprise that I'd never heard of so many of the facts behind this story. It's important that the stories of the past not be forgotten, and you have done us all a service to share this, and to draw the links that you have.