Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504100044
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-18 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WEIMAR, GERMANY LENGTH: Medium
The man who brought American GIs the news that prisoners were dying at Buchenwald was a young Czechoslovakian Jew who had decided it was time to break out.
Beresch Gross told his story of bravery and luck on Saturday, when he and his brother Alex, now American citizens, returned for a reunion with the 3rd Army veterans who entered the camp on April 11, 1945.
Fifty years ago, Gross slipped through the camp fences as SS guards at the Nazi concentration camp fled from approaching GIs. Gross took a machine gun and hand grenades from an abandoned watchtower, walked into the surrounding forest and came upon a beer garden.
Gross recalled: ``Still carrying the machine gun, I said ... `I'd like some water.'''
To his surprise, said the 71-year-old Gross, of Youngstown, Ohio, several SS guards appeared with their hands up. He marched them through the woods.
``All of a sudden we came upon a road. I saw a jeep in front and some tanks behind it,'' he said. He had found the Americans.
An American patrol went to the camp to confirm his account of the dead and the dying.
The Gross brothers were among 1,000 survivors who returned to Buchenwald on Saturday for 50th anniversary memorial services. Many came with their children.
From 1937 until the camp's liberation, prisoners from about 50 countries were locked inside Buchenwald, on a hilltop overlooking Weimar. About 56,000 were either murdered or died of disease and hunger.
German Communists were the first prisoners at Buchenwald, sent there because they were a political threat to Adolf Hitler. They were followed by Jews, Gypsies, Soviet soldiers and resistance fighters from across Europe.
About 4,000 of the 21,000 survivors were Jews.
Russian, Polish, French, Hebrew, English and other languages were heard as survivors once again walked on the site.
The six-oven crematorium was crowded with people staring silently at the walls, the floor, the blow-up picture taken 50 years ago by American troops of piles of bodies ready for burning.
It was the first time many of the survivors had revisited Buchenwald. Some had tears in their eyes. One Russian stopped at the main gate and said he'd changed his mind: He could not bear to go inside the camp.
Four Polish women - who were 14 when they, their mothers and their fathers were transported to Buchenwald as slave laborers - located the sites of the barracks where they spent part of their childhoods.
The women stopped at one of the dozens of cement foundations, all that's left of Buchenwald's barracks. One of them, Hanna Bronska, said: ``There's Block 17. That's where my father died.''
Beresch Gross was deported from Czechoslovakia to the Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland, along with his six siblings and their parents in early 1944. The parents were gassed. Miraculously, the seven children survived.
Beresch, Alex, and another brother Shandor were sent separately on ``death marches'' out of Auschwitz in late 1944 as the Red Army neared the mass-murder camp. Tens of thousands died on those marches.
After transiting through other camps, Alex and Shandor ended up at Buchenwald. They worried about Beresch, who now calls himself Bill.
``Every time a new transport of prisoners arrived, I went over and asked newcomers if they knew my brother,'' said 66-year-old Alex, who now lives in Atlanta.
``I kept on questioning this one guy,'' recalled Alex. ``It turned out the guy I was asking was Bill. We had both become so emaciated and sickly that at first we didn't recognize each other.''
by CNB