Mac, Brandy and Me World War II
Memories of a Soldier
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LIBERATING GUNSKIRCHEN Allied officers were afraid that desperate Nazi officers, before they went down, would kill all the Jews still alive in the camps. Already, thousands of prisoners from other camps had been sent on death marches to Mauthausen, a mammoth concentration camp complex in northern Austria. So in early May, the 71stInfantry Division, of which I was a part, turned south, crossed into Austria, and on May 4, liberated Gunskirchen, a camp that was part of Mauthausen. “Man’s inhumanity to man” doesn’t begin to describe what we saw. Although it had a crematorium, Mauthausen was used mostly for extermination through slave labor of the intelligentsia -- educated people like doctors and lawyers from countries taken over by the Nazi regime. Most of the 15,000 survivors we liberated were Hungarian Jews who had been forced to march on foot from their homeland to Austria. Once there, prisoners had to work in nearby stone quarries twelve hours a day. Undernourished, maltreated, totally exhausted, the prisoners weighed an average of about eighty-eight pounds. The people were so emaciated it was hard for us to distinguish the men from the women. I remember Captain J. D. Pletcher’s words to this day. I may not have them exact, but when we entered Gunskirchen, he said, “As we entered the camp, the living skeletons still able to walk crowded around us and, though we wanted to drive farther into the place, the milling, pressing crowd wouldn't let us. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every inmate was insane with hunger. Just the sight of an American brought cheers, groans, and shrieks. People crowded around to touch an American, to touch the Jeep, to kiss our arms—perhaps just to make sure that it was true. The people who couldn't walk crawled out toward our Jeep. Those who couldn't even crawl propped themselves up on an elbow, and somehow, through all their pain and suffering, revealed through their eyes the gratitude, the joy they felt at the arrival of Americans.” It would have been my pleasure to shoot the guards if they hadn’t already fled a few days earlier, sensing the end was near. One thing that stands out clearly in my memory concerns one of our wiremen named Able Baker. He was a redneck and probably an anti-Semite. But that day, he stood there and cried, cursing the guards for all of us.
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About the Book
This is the story of my life from ages eighteen to twenty-one, serving as an infantry soldier and radio operator in the European Theater during those years of combat against Germany during World War II. I am now eighty-six, looking back to those eventful years and remembering history. I grew up in the Bronx in New York in a wonderfully mixed neighborhood, full of Italian, Jewish, Polish, and Irish people and attended POS 89 along with all the other kids. We all walked to school together tossing a ball around and at times causing mischief, especially with a farmer and his goat along the way. Prejudice wasn’t a word we know. At eighteen, in the early forties, I enlisted in the army and began a whole new life. These are some of my most vivid memories from that time. It is about a friendship that was formed with two other soldiers who I met at Camp Wheeler by sheer coincidence; we went into combat together and became lifelong friends: one Italian, one Jewish, and the other Irish. We fought together, laughed together, cried together, and bonded. We were kids who became soldiers together and never lost the kinship we had found. Lord, how I miss them both. England, France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia—where else could an eighteen-year-old go free of charge, and with all his friends, too? And being on a huge passenger liner to boot … well, there were a few problems but hey, that’s the way it was. This is dedicated to those few of us who are still here and to all who didn’t make it.
About the Author
Jules Blitz was born in 1925 in New York City, New York. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1943 on his eighteenth birthday. During World War II, he served as an infantryman and radio operator through three campaigns in France and Germany, ending in Czechoslovakia. He served as a private and was a tech sergeant at the war’s end. He received an honorable discharge in 1946, and for his service to our country, he was awarded two Battle Stars, a Combat Infantry Badge, a Good Conduct Medal, and a Bronze Star. He received a BA from New York University in 1948. He was married in 1950 to Barbara and they recently celebrated their 62nd wedding anniversary. He also has 3 sons, Brian, Roger and Scott as well as a daughterin-law Jodi. There are 4 wonderful grandchildren, Ryan, Ari, Staci and Erin. Upon his return from the war, he resided in Washington, DC, and then moved to Maryland. He was CEO of Pridemark Homes in Maryland for forty years.