Rabbi Klausner's Memoir: The Liberation of Dachau

Presented by Rabbi Stern

I came to Dachau the third week of May to join the 116th Evacuation Hospital Unit, agroup of doctors and nurses who had been brought there to take care of the sick. When I arrived in Dachau I had no assignment of any kind. No one told me what to do. watched the doctors and nurses as they went about their rounds and I felt completely lost in the sense that here were people working endlessly; trying to save whatever souls they could and I was unable to be part of that team. I was no doctor and I had no resources. I kept thinking, "What can do?" All I had to distribute was the little mezzuzot the chaplains ordinarily gave to Jewish soldiers.

The following morning I walked through the barbed wire gates and decided to make contact with the survivors who were taken out of the prison section and moved into another section of the Dachau camp. I began to walk up and down the row of barracks wondering which barracks I should enter and what I was going to do once I entered. Finally, I forced myself into a barrack. I opened the door and I came into this dark room where the people were still in their concentration uniforms and were still living on shelves in the barracks.

People paid very little attention to me. They walked around me as if in a dream and then one survivor, observing my uniform and the symbol of the Chaplaincy Corps, stared at it and the first question he asked me was, "Do you know my uncle in Toledo?" I was shocked. The first question coming out of the Holocaust was "Do you know?" And then another came and the same thing: "Do you know?" "Do you know?" As I began to think out this series of questions, a voice came from one of the shelves. When that voice came to me, everyone stood aside as if to allow the voice to come towards me. It was a very thin, weeping voice and it said, "I had a brother. We lived together." He told me the community in I which they lived and then he said he left us and went to the United States and became a rabbi. And the voice asked, "Do you know my brother?" No name was given--except as the voice came towards me I was attracted by the timbre of the voice, the weeping in the voice, and before the voice was through I said, "Yes, I know your brother."

I was amazed even as I said it, because that voice was familiar to me. I had heard it among a contingent of chaplains when we came across the Channel to Germany. I put the I two voices together and I said, "I know your brother." Then the voice said to me, "Don't say things that are not true just to console me." I said, "I am not consoling you. I am going to, bring your brother to you." And I rushed out of the barracks because I couldn't cope with the situation. I was afraid of it, but when I got outside I was so sure that I had put the two voices together that I was satisfied that I came to Dachau. If nothing else would ever happen, I had done something and I now felt the beginning of what was to become my history and career within the survivor community.

Biography of Rabbi Klausner: Rabbi Abraham Klausner served as a Jewish army chaplain with the American soldiers who liberated the Dachau concentration camp. He was born May 8,1915 in Memphis, Tennessee. After completing both BA and MA degrees from the University of Denver, Rabbi Klausner went on to receive a Master of Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew Union College in 1943 and was ordained Rabbi that same year.

In 1944 he entered the US Army While working with Holocaust survivors he founded and directed the Central Committee of Liberated Jews of Germany He served in this position until leaving the army in 1948 when he became provost at Hebrew Union College. From 1950 -1954 he served as rabbi at Temple Israel in Boston, Massachusetts and, from 1954 until his retirement, as rabbi at Temple Emanual in Yonkers, New York.

Rabbi Klausner is also the author of numerous publications.