American Valor Quarterly Issue 1 - Winter 2007 | Page 12

Never Forget
An American Soldier’s View of Unspeakable Evil
By Harry Zaslow
Harry Zaslow was born in Philadelphia in 1925, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants who had come to America to escape the
edicts of the Czar’s government. At the age of 19, he joined the
United States Army, serving with the 283rd Field Artillery Battalion, fighting in four combat campaigns and 15 battles in Germany
and Europe. On April 29, 1945, he participated in the liberation
of Dachau Concentration Camp—one of history’s most gruesome
symbols of inhumanity. What he witnessed there, and throughout
the war-torn towns and villages of Europe, would remain with him
for over sixty years…

the Gestapo. Being discovered meant being beaten
unconscious, and then being beaten some more. A seven
year old boy told of his father being burned alive at the
stake, an imitation of the Spanish Inquisition.
Another girl was thrown into a temporary camp behind the
enemy’s lines for the pleasure of the German soldiers. The
Gestapo agent asked her name and age.
“My name is Ellen, and I am
18-years-old,” she told him.

Charlori, Belgium
It was September 27, 1944.
Other Jewish soldiers in my
battalion and I traveled to
Charlori for the High Holy Day
services of Yom Kippur.
Charlori was a beautiful town,
and I was reminded that while
Jews in America were praying
in beautiful synagogues with
their loved ones, these battered
people were in the remnants of
a synagogue that had been
burned to the ground by the
Nazis.

“You will not see your 19 th
birthday,” the agent told her,
coldly.

A German girl is overcome as she walks among the bodies of
slave workers killed by the Nazis. Allied forces exhumed the
bodies from mass graves and laid them out so the townspeople
could see, first-hand, the work of their leaders.

Of the 500 Jews that had lived
in the area, only a small group remained. Most of the men,
women, and children had been taken away to Germany or
Poland. With my knowledge of Yiddish, I was able to hear
their stories as told by those who were left behind. The
Gestapo came in the middle of the night and took children
away, some as young as two or three-years-old. Each Belgian
Jew had someone missing: a sister, a husband, a child, a
father, grandparents, uncles, aunts. In spite of these cruel
tragedies, they were ecstatic when the U.S. Army liberated
the town and what was left of its people.

Ellen’s father stood by in
horror, his wife already having
been taken away. Shortly after,
however, the American army
began shelling the Germans day
and night, forcing them to
retreat and release Ellen and
other Jewish women. There
was no time for German
soldiers to be entertained by
female hostages.

Ellen made her way back to her
town of Charlori, but where was her family? I met Ellen
the night she fled from the retr X][