Kristallnacht and Veterans Day: A Soldier's Letter On the Day of Victory
MAY 8, 1945: VICTORY, LIBERATION, AND LOSS
By Eli Kavon
It was “The Day the War Ended,” Sir Martin Gilbert’s title of his 1995 work on May 8, 1945 and the unconditional surrender of Germany to the Allies to end WWII in Europe. My father, nineteen years before I was born, was the sergeant of a heavy machine gun squad in the 97th Infantry Division. Called the “Trident” Division, its soldiers fought in Europe in the last months of the war. On the last day of the war, the troops were in the Sudetenland battling the German fanatics who fought until the end. Later, the soldiers of the 97th were stationed in Japan with Macarthur’s occupation army.
Paul Cohen was an unlikely man to lead a machine-gun squad. Soft-spoken and having done his best to stay out of the fighting—he earned his stripes for his superior administrative skills at the Bartow Army Air Corps base in Central Florida—he found himself in basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, toward the middle of 1944, ready to be sent to fight the Nazis in Europe. Upon arriving in the rubble that had been Le Havre, France, he was ordered to lead a heavy machine- gun squad. He saw dangerous action in the Ruhr Pocket in Germany and fought to liberate Eger (the German name for the Bohemian town of Cheb) on April 25, 1945. If it had been up to him, he would have remained in the sunshine for the rest of the war. But that was not to be his fate. His mission in Europe was to fight the Germans. But, as a Jew, he had the added responsibility to witness the last days of Hitler’s genocide of the Jews. He was a liberator.
Although his family name was Cohen, my father was not a kohen, and, in fact, his real family name was “Kavon.” At Ellis Island, my grandparents, immigrants from Pinsk, gave their name as “Cohen.” I don’t know why. After the war, the family returned to the original name. During his first 21 years, my father was “Paul Cohen” but that was soon to change. For the rest of his life, until his death at 75 in 1999, he would be “Paul “Pesach” Kavon”.
While in the service, my father continually wrote letters to his parents and two older sisters (his two older brothers were drafted and in Europe). He grew up in Astoria, Queens in New York City. His letters are an eyewitness account of the last days of the Third Reich. I want to focus on the letter he wrote on May 8, 1945, the day of Allied victory in the European Theater of Operations. He wrote, not about the celebration of the end of the war. He wrote about what would later be known as the Holocaust.
Writing from Bohemia on V-E Day, my father described to the family the suffering and devastation of a world war. After describing in the first paragraph the announcement of German surrender and his divisions’ final fight against the last Nazi fanatics, my father discusses the American liberation of Russian soldiers from a POW camp on the last day of the war. He was taken aback by the number of Soviet soldiers with only one arm. This amputation was “something they had told us the Krauts had done as punishment.” The GI’s caught the Soviets’ German prison-keepers. “We had the Russians guard them on their way back to the Prisoner of War compound, and you can just imagine how those Russians reacted with the tables finally turned. They made the Krauts run all of the 5 miles back to the P.W. camp and if any of them lagged behind, the Russians hit them with their rifle butts and really made them keep on moving.”
But it was his encounter with Jews—and German towns emptied of Jews—that dominate his narrative. He and his closest friend in the outfit—George Skolnik—met five young Jewish women whom the Nazis took from their home and imprisoned in a concentration camp. “You can just imagine how these girls looked as they told us about the whole thing.” ?Both Jewish GI’s were shocked. The Germans forced these women on a death march, about 18 miles a day, and only fed them three potatoes a day. They related horrors to him; “One little boy saw some beets in a field and ran out to pick some because he was starving. He didn’t get very far because the Germans shot him before he could get to the food.”
The Jewish sergeant continues: “They related so many things to us that to tell you all of them would require I write a book about it. One finds it hard to believe that humans could possibly live through something like that, but a few managed to survive and were able to tell us these things.” Paul Kavon never wrote his book chronicling the suffering of these survivors.
He continues: “The girls spoke a beautiful Yiddish and were surprised to find American soldiers who could also speak the language and who were brought up in a religious atmosphere. After seeing these girls, believe me, all that has been said about the German dogs is not propaganda but true facts. Just to hear about these things is not enough. When you see it with your own eyes it makes a much greater impression on you. Oh yes, before I forget to mention it, we haven’t met any Jewish men yet wherever we’ve been.”
In his letter, my father is eyewitness to the Nazi destruction of Jewish civilization in Europe. “Another incident in one of the towns we rolled through is typical of what has occurred throughout the lands conquered by the Nazis. We were quartered in a house, and while I was standing guard outside, I noticed a building with all the windows broken, roof torn down and, generally, in a deplorable state. I knew it couldn’t have been from bombing because the surrounding homes where we were quartered were in good shape despite the war.
“I noticed two words on the outside painted over with white paint. I could just barely make out the words “Israelite Gotthaus” and I knew immediately that it must have been a synagogue. My best friend in the company, George Skolnik from New Haven, Connecticut and myself went about investigating.
“The Germans told us it was a temple, and when we inquired about the whereabouts of the Jews of the town, they said that only six Jews remained and they died of old age. The door of the temple was locked, but we got they key and upon entering the door, a sight greeted our eyes that enraged us more than anything before.
“The Nazis had used it as the city dump! The bastards had thrown every type of filth and decay in there, but more than that, after a bit of rummaging about, we came upon bones, carcasses we could not identify. We found half-burnt siddurim and the S.S. troopers had really left their mark on the temple. Our anger was beyond words, and if it had been in our hands, we would have riddled the town with our heavy machine guns.”
Instead, Cohen and Skolnik went to the prisoner of war compound to try to get German POW’s to clean out the entire building, or what was left of it. But their lieutenant said they had to move out. The synagogue had likely been desecrated years earlier in Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938), a Nazi pogrom that was carried out in the Greater Reich—Germany and Austria—and resulted in the burning of hundreds of synagogues and the plundering of 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses.
The Jewish GI’s in the company did most of the interpreting, although George spoke much better German than my father (my father’s first language was Yiddish). The Jewish sergeant finishes his letter on a defiant note. “We [George Skolnik and I] usually have the job of chasing Germans out of homes we need to garrison troops. We both walk in, rifles ready, and tell them to get out. We’ve had great satisfaction doing that and innumerable times we’ve scared hell out of them by telling them we are both Jews. They move and they move fast. Our turn has come to give orders—and give them we do as they look down the business end of a rifle or heavy machine gun!”
It was victory for the Allies. But Hitler deemed himself a prophet who envisioned a world without Jews. And he almost succeeded. Two out of three European Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Jewish civilization in Europe was destroyed. My father arrived in Europe to witness the aftermath. After what he experienced, he never forgot to tell me of the last days of the Nazi war against the Jews. That war ended on May 8, 1945. Had American soldiers not fought in the war and liberated Jews, the destruction of European Jewry would have been complete.
The writer is rabbi of Congregation Anshei Sholom in West Palm Beach, Florida.