Lester Edelstein was moving across Austria when he and his fellow soldiers in Gen. George Patton’s Army were assailed by a terrible stench. It was the smell of dead bodies. Then he saw the closed gates. After the soldiers opened them, what they saw defied belief.
Several thousand people of all ages — all dressed in thin-striped pajamas — were gaunt and filthy. Their stomachs were distended from hunger. Mountains of vermin-infested clothing lay about the area. It was the Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp.
“Those who could speak cheered us,” Edelstein later revealed in a taped recording kept at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
“They knew we were coming because the Nazi guard of SS troops had left the day before wearing civilian clothes the prisoner tailors had made for them.”
During the Holocaust, the Nazi regime murdered an estimated 6 million Jews as part of an effort to purify the country and all its occupied territories. Mauthausen was one of the deadliest camps the Third Reich operated during that time. At least 90,000 prisoners died of the 190,000 imprisoned there.
Edelstein, who died in 2009 at the age of 90, had a unique perspective as a Jewish soldier from Nanty Glo. He liberated prisoners who had been sent there to die for having the same religious views as he did.
“Quite a number of prisoners were able to speak English,” Edelstein said. “They found out that I was the only Jewish officer there at the time. I was practically mobbed. They wanted to shake my hand. Many begged in Yiddish and in English for help, food, cigarettes and clothing. I assured them that help was on the way.”
During World War II, about half of all Jewish males between 18 and 50 enlisted for the service. Nationwide, 550,000 Jews in America fought during World War II. Ten thousand were killed in action, according to Gemma Birnbaum, the associate vice president of media and education at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
“That’s true of all the Allied countries. There were disproportionately more people fighting in the war than there were Jews in the population,” Birnbaum said. “I think there were a significant number who were drafted. But a lot of Jews knew what was happening in Europe at the time. It was a personal war for many Jews at the time. They felt this kinship with the Jews who were being murdered across Europe.”
In Johnstown, more than 200 Jewish men and women served. That was 17 percent of the Jewish population in the community.
For the rest of the population, more than 16 million American men and women served in World War II. Online estimates peg that to be at around 12 percent of the overall population during that era.
During the war, Johnstown’s Jewish population followed the national trend in disproportionately contributing to the war effort. Glosser Bros. department store, which was owned by the most influential and respected Jewish family in the community, frequently held fundraisers to support the military.
Rabbi Irving Ganz, of Rodef Sholom, the town’s first synagogue, spoke to the Johnstown Rotary Club in 1942 about the need to fight totalitarian states. Later in the year, he and the Beth Zion synagogue members observed a worldwide day that mourned the loss of Jews in Europe.
“The voice of those who today gather in their synagogues to plead for divine intercession is the voice from the grave of a million martyred Jews,” he was quoted as saying in The Johnstown Tribune. “The voice comes from the forests of eastern Europe--stained with the blood of those ruthlessly executed.”
Synagogues throughout the country galvanized America to fight Hitler and Nazism for the mass executions of Jews and other groups in Europe. Other organizations within that faith also played a role in the war effort.
The Jewish War Veterans Hall in Johnstown hosted civilian defense courses during the war.
Several groups, including the Johnstown Jewish Community Council, lent their help in the early 1940s. Jewish women in the area helped to sell 385 bonds in one year, raising a total of $70,225, which would be worth more than $1 million today.
Though the story of Cambria County’s Jewish community during the war is remarkable in and of itself, Edelstein’s specific account stands apart because he was both a direct witness to the Holocaust and a savior of his own people. He watched as bulldozers helped Austrian civilians move bodies into trenches as they watched the aftermath of the final solution. He learned all the horrible things of which man was capable, but also the strength of the human spirit in surviving those evils.
After the outbreak of war, people from across Europe were deported to Mauthausen, which gradually evolved into a system of several interconnected camps. During this phase, Mauthausen and Gusen were the concentration camps with the harshest imprisonment conditions and the highest mortality, according to the camp’s memorial website. Prisoners at the bottom of the camp hierarchy had barely any chance of surviving for long. Those who were ill or “useless” to the SS were in constant danger of losing their lives. In 1941 the SS started to construct a gas chamber and other installations at Mauthausen for the systematic murder of large groups of people.
On May 5, 1945, the U.S. Army reached Gusen and Mauthausen. Some prisoners were in such a weakened state that many still died in the days and weeks after liberation.
One of Mauthausen’s prisoners, a Hungarian Jew named Tibor Rubin, was taken from the barracks and moved to an Army field hospital 2 miles away from the camp. He was barely conscious when Army Corpsmen brought him in on a stretcher. The attending physician and nurse took emergency measures to save his life. Upon recovering, the young boy swore to himself that he would pay the Americans back for rescuing him.
The staff didn’t know it at the time, but they had cared for a person who went on to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. After Rubin came to America afterward, he volunteered for service during the Korean War. Without any help, he defended a hill against enemy soldiers. He rescued someone amid sniper fire, according to Daniel M. Cohen’s biography of him, “Single Handed: The Inspiring True Story of Tibor “Teddy” Rubin, Holocaust Survivor, Korean War Hero, and Medal of Honor Recipient.”
Edelstein toured the camp. He discovered prisoners were stripped naked and suspended upside down from a concrete pit. Hungry police dogs and dobermans proceeded to come in and jump up and bite the genitals of the prisoners.
At one end of the camp was a stone quarry, a steep wall and a small lake. Prisoners were forced to carry a heavy rock up the steep slope. If they made it, they had to repeat the task the next day and so on until they fell to their death in the lake. There were hundreds of skeletons and bodies in the lake.
He went into the sitting room in the infirmary. The victims were seated in chairs, lights were turned on and they were told to look at the camera. As it clicked, they were shot in the back of the head, Edelstein said on a taped recording before his death.
The Mauthausen trial was among the most important of the Dachau trials, proceeding against 61 defendants, including camp personnel, prisoner functionaries and civilian workers implicated there. Most of the the Holocaust proceedings were held at the former concentration camp of Dachau between 1945 and 1949, according to “The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany,” written by Tomaz Jardim.
American investigators working at Mauthausen lacked resources and sufficient staff and therefore came to wholly rely on a group of survivors determined to play a role in bringing their former captors to justice, Jardim wrote.
During the trial, prosecutors used the common defense argument, which was based on the belief that guards and administrators unlawfully, willfully and knowingly conspired to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. The trial produced more death sentences than any other in American history. Forty-nine men were condemned to die.
Some legal scholars have criticized the approach used to convict Holocaust criminals at Dachau because they were denied certain safeguards in the American judicial system, including the right to an appeal. Hearsay could be used. But the U.S. military did a fairly good job at providing a judicial process on the way to punishment given the massive number of criminals they had to try in a short period of time, according to Jardim.
“One of the most positive outcomes of the Mauthausen trial or the whole judicial process was the role of camp survivors in the process,” Jardim said. “As I describe in the book, what occurs is you wind up with the liberation of Mauthausen, and Americans coming across such a horrific scene. They’re totally understaffed. and they wind up ending up dependent on camp survivors to gather evidence. To me, it is a vital part in allowing the survivors to emerge from powerlessness.”
Following the war, Edelstein returned home to his wife, Carolyn (Shapiro). Edelstein spent his entire career with one company, M. Glosser & Sons, a scrap metal brokerage and industrial supply company in Johnstown. Edelstein worked there for 37 years, rising to the title of vice president and controller. He was active in the community by supporting various philanthropic endeavors, and he helped found a new synagogue in Westmont. He had three children, including Joyce Edelstein.
“I think his experience in Mauthausen really drove him to be so active in the Jewish community and in supporting Jewish causes,” she said. “He didn’t really talk about that experience to us very much. That’s common for some veterans.”
Before he died, Lester Edelstein warned of charismatic leaders calling upon our worst hatreds. He referred to the Holocaust as a singular event. It’s not something that is outside of history. It’s within it.
“It is part of us and will never leave us,” Edelstein said. “It was a structured, diabolical program to kill all the Jews because they were Jewish. The final solution. We must not let it happen again. The Holocaust is not a sectarian Jewish preserve. To tell it, to teach it calls upon the best efforts and consciences from all religions, ethnic and cultural sectors.”