Liberation from Buchenwald

[Text: Robbie, a prisoner at Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, was fifteen years old when he witnessed Allied soldiers arrive at the camp gates on April 11, 1945.] 

Robbie Waisman: I looked at the clock, and it was 10 minutes to four. And I looked a little bit more, then I saw some movement. That’s when I saw GIs coming in. American soldiers. I presumed they were American soldiers because they looked different. They looked different. Their uniforms were different, their helmets were different. Everything about them was different. We had seen enough of the German army and German SS to see the difference. You could see it at a glance. It was a short while after, I saw the GIs, and then behind them, I saw these Black men coming. We didn’t move very much for the first while because we were stunned. We didn’t know what was happening. But the faces of these Black men were indelved in my memory. Subsequent to this, of course, you know that one of those men is Dr. Leon Bass, he was then 19 years old. But he ultimately went back to the States and became a teacher, and then received a doctorate, and has been very active since then. Forty years later, I think about three or four years ago, he decided that this, what he saw in Buchenwald when he came to liberate us, was too valuable for him to keep quiet about it. So, he decided to come out and start talking about it and he’s been lecturing in various schools. And he was brought in here to Vancouver. 

The first instinct we wanted is to touch. We wanted to feel, to see that it’s real. And talking to Dr. Leon Bass, and here, I’m now beginning to understand why and how they felt. He was a 19-year-old. Not prepared for what he saw in Buchenwald. The army did not prepare them, they did not ... of course, how could they prepare them? They didn’t know of the atrocities that were committed against the people. The only crime that the people had committed was that they were Jewish. My own views, I didn’t understand and know what has happened. It took years and years for me to ... everything to assimilate the information, to realize. First of all, I thought that my—all my family was still alive with the exception, maybe, of my brother that I knew wasn’t alive. And we wanted to, after the liberation, to just go back to our own lives and resume what we had left before. Go back home and rejoin with your family, and go back to school, and all these things just, you know, in a flash, come back to you. Oh, wonderful, I’m going home. And you’re filled with euphoria. You just—you’re walking on air.