Dachau survivor, liberator become friends 67 years later

Ernie Gross, 83, of Northeast Philadelphia, was a 16-year-old Orthodox Jew from Romania when on April 29, 1945, he found himself waiting to be put to death at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Don Greenbaum, 87, of Bala Cynwyd, was a 20-year-old corporal from Philadelphia who, with hundreds of fellow U.S. soldiers, arrived to liberate Dachau that very day, literally in the nick of time to save Gross' life.

For almost 67 years, neither knew the other existed.

Now, they have found each other, and are becoming friends - two white-haired men with a shared determination that the world must never forget the six million Jews, along with million of others considered undesirable, who were murdered by the Nazis in World War II.

"I always wanted to meet somebody who liberated me, because I wasn't clear at the time," said Gross, who spoke Romanian and Yiddish as a child. "I knew it was April 29, because it was in the papers. But I wanted to talk to somebody about everything that was happening."

Greenbaum, above all, remembers the camp survivors reaching out in filthy rags, and his reply: "Ich bin ein Jude." "I am a Jew."

He has snapshots to remind him - and prove - that what he saw was real: boxcar after boxcar of emaciated dead spilled atop one another, limbs askew, eyes agog.

"I will never understand how a guy could go home and play with his children, and kiss his wife, and go to the movies or the theater, and go out the next morning and shoot people or push them into a gas chamber," he said.

Gross was born into a family of nine in the Transylvanian town of Turt, near Romania's current borders with Hungary and Ukraine.

He recalls a lonely childhood. He didn't get much attention from his overwhelmed parents, and was teased or ignored in the Romanian-language school, where he was one of few Jewish boys. He was an indifferent student, but did better in Hebrew school.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany started World War II by invading Poland. The war - and the Holocaust - raged for 41/2 years before it came to Turt on the morning after Passover 1944.

Gross' mother had gotten him up early to help bake matzo. There was a rap on the door. Two Hungarian policemen stood outside. Although both Romania and Hungary were German allies, the area had come under Hungarian control.

The police ordered the Grosses, along with a couple of hundred other Jewish families, to vacate their home and assemble at the synagogue within one hour.

"They said, 'The only thing you can take with you is food for a day,' " Gross said. " 'And if after an hour we see you walking around, we have orders - we will shoot you.' "

For four or five days, with no toilets, the Turt Jews were locked in the house of worship. Then one morning, the door banged open. Wagons were waiting.

The Hungarians had decided to round up Jews and put them in ghettos, as the Germans had done in Poland.

After the ghettos, Polish Jews had been shipped to the Treblinka death camp. For the Turt Jews, the destination was Auschwitz.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum says that from April to July 1944, about 426,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz. About 320,000 died in gas chambers. The young and the fit went to slave labor camps in Austria and Germany.

Gross remembers the selection process as deportees got off the trains.

A Polish prisoner whispered, "Tell them you're 17."

At 17, he'd likely be chosen for work. If he gave his real age, 15, he'd be marked for death.

As he got to the front of the line, Gross stood before a German soldier in a gray coat.

He had never seen a German, but he was more afraid of a snarling German shepherd.

How old are you?

"I am 17."

How old?

"I am 17," he said again, louder.

He was sent to work.

Labor camps, for most, were slow death. For months, into the winter of 1944-45, Gross carried cement, wiped toilets, chopped wood in the forest.

For food, there was a crust of bread. Eight laborers, he recalled, had to share a small brown loaf. They'd tear it and draw lots for the pieces.

He said that a cousin, also an inmate, found a potato. Gross thought, "How do I ask him to give me some?" He decided to ask for the skin.

The cousin refused, an act that left a gulf between them after both, somehow, survived the war.

"My cousin said, 'If I give you a piece, maybe you are not going to survive, and I am not going to survive. But if I keep it for myself, maybe I am going to survive.'

"I learned, in order to survive, you have to be selfish."

Gross was shuttled among camps near Munich. Close by was Dachau: the end of the line.

Dachau had opened in the '30s as a detention site for intellectuals, homosexuals, the disabled, and others the Nazis saw as outcasts, as well as Gypsies and Jews. It had evolved into an extermination site because it had ovens.

On April 28, Gross was on a train to Dachau. En route, it was attacked by U.S. planes, causing a day's delay in reaching the camp.

On April 29, as he stood in line, with crematoriums in sight, he resigned himself to death.

"Then I saw the Germans throwing down their guns," he said. "I could not figure it out. I turned around, and the Americans were behind me."

Greenbaum was one of three children of a leather manufacturer from the city's Wynnefield section. He joined the Army in 1943 after graduating from a military school in Georgia where he played football and ran track.

By April 1945, he was a seasoned veteran, a forward observer in the 283d Field Artillery Battalion. His job was to ride in front and spot German positions. He'd then call in artillery barrages.

The previous November, near Aachen, Germany, an enemy observer "spotted me first." An exploding shell knocked him cold. He awoke in a hospital with a wound to his side and a Purple Heart.

He was back in combat for the Battle of the Bulge, after which American troops advanced rapidly into Germany.

On April 29, German surrender was only eight days away.

Dachau, he recalled, was just an objective on a map. Allied troops had begun finding concentration camps, but he knew nothing of this.

"In those days, concentration camps, death camps, we had never even heard the expression."

A mile from Dachau, he said, "there was an odor we could not identify."

He remembers only that he saw no Germans - at least none living - after passing through a handsome gate, with a high wall and big trees.

At an inner compound, emaciated inmates lay dead or starving. Some walked in their prison stripes like ghouls.

A French priest gave Greenbaum and others a tour of the railhead, where hundreds of dead lay in the rail cars.

It was all beyond imagination, he said. It still is.

The two men might never have met if Greenbaum's wife, Shelley, hadn't written an article about some of his war experiences for the Jewish Exponent in November.

Gross saw it and called Greenbaum. They met for lunch at the Tiffany diner on the Boulevard, near Gross' condominium apartment.

Both had children and grandchildren, but their lives had been much different.

Gross spent two years in a displaced-persons camp before a Jewish refugee agency sponsored him to come to America. With little formal education, he scrounged to make a living. He owned a deli, did janitorial work, ran a lunch truck on the Temple University campus.

He outlasted two wives, and now lives alone.

Greenbaum, after a flare-up of his physical wounds and suffering what he thinks was PTSD, spent time at the old Valley Forge military hospital. He graduated from Dickinson College and became a successful salesman. He still works and plays golf.

Gross, though younger, felt Greenbaum was "more energetic."

"We got along immediately, like we know each other all the time," he said.

The two have met several times, and often talk about their late-in-life commitment to sharing their stories - at schools, colleges, Rotary clubs, anywhere they can gain a hearing.

This is new for them, a realization that both camp survivors and camp liberators are, quite literally, a dying breed.

Contact Tom Infield at 610-313-8205 or tinfield@phillynews.com, or follow on Twitter @tinfield.