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TI: Now, was it during this time when you came across, you know, the Dachau camp? Can you describe that whole incident?

VW: Okay. Well, we went through Augsburg and so on, and when we were approaching Dachau, none of us knew what Dachau meant, really. We figured just another town, at least I did, but maybe some of the map readers might have known that that's where one of the concentration camps were, I'm not sure. But we noticed there were about four or five guys up ahead of us, kind of on a small hill with some trees. And we wondered what that was, and we weren't sure. But as we approached, we could see that they were in striped clothes, vertical striped clothes. And we got up near there and they were tearing meat out of an old dead horse and eating it right out of the flank. And out of his hip area, they had torn that, that skin off and hair, and they were pulling that meat out and eating it. And okay, it wasn't real hot weather, no. In fact, we had a little snow on the ground yet and so on, so that helped maybe preserve the horses that had been killed by our artillery. So that way, I don't know what happened to those guys whether they died from eatin' it or not, I'm not sure.

TI: But when you first saw that, what were you thinking?

VW: Oh, it was, it was bad. It made us, I remember our comment to one another, we were saying how sickening that was to see that happen. But that's the way it was. Then we approached Dachau. And as we were approaching, two of our guys who were probably in maybe the scout area, they shot the lock off the compound, and the guys wouldn't come out. They were afraid that, afraid that when they looked at our two, three, four 442nd guys, they thought maybe Japan had come to help Hitler, and they were afraid to come out. But then it didn't take too long to, to eventually convince them that we were Americans, and so everything was all right. Now, I talked to a bunch of 'em, and in the evening, before we saw too many of them, we roped off the area where we were eating for that night.

TI: But Virgil, before we go there, can you tell me your first impressions? When you first got there, describe what you saw, what it smelled like, what you heard, as much as you can tell me about this.

VW: There was a rank smell in the area, and the extermination furnaces were still warm. So they had been used by the SS already that particular day. This is in the evening, now, and so, and then the guys with striped clothes, they were all around, and they wanted to come real close to us. And their breath was just unbelievable. Just unbelievable. And they wouldn't, they kind of forgot about personal space and so on, you know, they were so anxious to get, they wanted to be comforted, they wanted the comfort from kind people. And, of course, we were military, and that even made it even better because they felt protection kind of from that. And so I talked to him a little bit, but not very long. And sometimes I'd turn my head to the right in order to take a deep breath, 'cause we weren't backing up, we didn't dare back up and take a backwards step, 'cause we were soldiers. And then we talked to 'em some more. And then we were instructed by the, by the officers not to feed 'em, 'cause there were two reasons. One is that we were short on rations ourselves because the supplies hadn't been able to keep up with us. And so, and then also the other part was that they might die the next morning if they ate too much food. Well, they didn't, that order didn't last very long because you can't, you can't not feed a starving person. You just got to feed 'em. So that's what we did. And a lot of the guys pulled their blankets out of their pack and wrapped 'em up, wrapped up these prisoners 'cause they were freezing. Very cold.

TI: And what was going through your mind when you saw them, when they came up to you and you saw their condition? What were some of the things that you were thinking?

VW: Oh, just knowing right away, our thoughts went to Hitler and how he, what kind of an individual he was to treat people like that. Even if they weren't the same religion or the same, the same nationality and so on, it shouldn't matter. It shouldn't, it should never be, you wouldn't even treat an animal like that. We wouldn't. And here he was treatin' human beings like that. And just, just unbelievable cruelty from Hitler.

TI: Now, was it, was it, when you first got there, did you know who these people were that you were liberating? Was it, did someone tell you or did you figure this out?

VW: Well, we, when we saw the striped clothes, we knew that they were prisoners and that they were being persecuted by the German hierarchy, yes. We had heard lessons, or heard rumors about how the concentration camps were, but I didn't know they were Dachau at all, or what it meant when they said Dachau. Buchenwald was a little different. I remember hearing about Buchenwald, that was another concentration camp, but I didn't know about Dachau.

TI: Well, you mentioned when you got there, towards the evening, the ovens were still warm.

VW: Yeah.

TI: Did you witness or see, like, bodies and things like that in the camp?

VW: Well, a lot of the guys took pictures of, especially the ones that were just, just ahead of us, for example. They went into different areas of the camp and took pictures of "stacked wood," bodies stacked up, and just like cordwood. And in the, in the boxcars and on piles and so on. And I looked at, I was there looking at a burning pit, and I picked up, I saw little round discs in the soil, and I wondered what they were for. So I picked one up and looked at it, and it had a number on it, four numbers. Fifty-three eighty-one or something like that. And they were about, oh, a half-inch thick, little less than a half-inch thick, and about two and a half inches around. And evidently that must have been some crushed... what do you call it? Well, the cremation material from these ovens. And maybe that's how they kept track of the ones that they got rid of, the Germans did. They put a number on it. And so that would be a number of a, probably some Jewish fellow. And I did call up one time to a Jewish organization and ask if they wanted, would want to look at that and maybe keep it, and they didn't answer back. I left a message on the recorder, but they didn't answer back, so that's as far as I went with it. I still have it with me at home.

<End Segment 40> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.