Holocaust soldiers recall capture, liberation By ANITA WADHWANI Staff Writer 4 were among 350 Americans sent to camp because they 'seemed' Jewish On a cold German morning shortly before the end of World War II, a 19-year-old Tennessee soldier named Wallace Carden stood before Nazi officers as they issued the command: ''Jewish soldiers, one step forward.'' None of the 4,000 U.S. soldiers captured in the Battle of the Bulge moved, so the Nazis decided to pick out the soldiers who ''seemed'' Jewish and send them to a forced labor camp. Carden was among those picked. Three hundred and fifty soldiers were loaded onto boxcars and sent on a journey without food or water to the Berga camp in northern Germany. More than 70 were Jewish. Most, like Carden, were not. Four of the survivors of the Berga concentration camp — now all in their late 70s — stood yesterday on a Vanderbilt University stage and spoke to an audience of teenagers not much younger than they were when captured. The event was part of the Tennessee Holocaust Commission's continuing educational programs aimed at high school teachers and their students. About 300 attended yesterday's speech. Carden enlisted from Briceville, Tenn., a coal-mining town northeast of Oak Ridge. When he first entered basic training and was sent to the 28th Infantry, he weighed about 190 pounds, he guesses. Liberated by U.S. soldiers after two months in Berga, he weighed 90 pounds. He remembers liberation like this: ''A lieutenant came up and pointed at me and said, 'What the hell is that?' '' The man was pointing in shock at Carden's emaciated body. He and other men were too weak to pick up the rations offered by U.S. soldiers. More than 70 men died in the camp or in the forced march in spring 1945 as Allied troops neared. Berga was part of an extended Nazi system of concentration camps that included forced labor camps, where many people were worked to death. The men worked side by side with Jewish detainees and political prisoners blasting tunnels to create a synthetic fuel factory as part of the Nazi war effort. At night they slept two to a bunk, three bunks to the ceiling in unheated barracks infested with lice. There was so little food that the imprisoned U.S. soldiers invented an elaborate system called ''bread-cutting squads'' for di viding up the single loaf of bread meant to feed a half-dozen men a day. ''The guy who cut the bread that day got the last slice,'' said Bill Shapiro, a medic captured with the 28th Infantry Division who spoke to students yesterday. ''That way, the slices were divided very evenly.'' Shapiro, now a retired doctor living in Palm Beach, Fla., was among the Jewish soldiers sent to Berga. Soon after his surrender, he was interrogated by Nazi captors in a way typical of the Battle of the Bulge prisoners, he said. They asked for not only his name, rank and serial number, but also for his mother's maiden name and his father's profession in an effort to determine whether he was Jewish. His dog tags, with the tell-tale ''H'' signifying ''Hebrew,'' were hidden in his shoes. ''The interrogator shouted, 'You're Jewish!' '' Shapiro said. ''Not to my credit, I answered, 'No,' '' Shapiro said. He was sent to Berga anyway. The other Berga survivors speaking yesterday were Tony Acevedo, a California native of Mexican descent who is not Jewish and was captured with the 70th Infantry Division; and Gerry Daub, a Brooklyn native who is Jewish and was assigned to the 100th Infantry Division. The story of the U.S. soldiers in the Berga camp was a little-known part of Holocaust history until filmmaker Charles Guggenheim made the documentary Berga: Soldiers of Another War, which aired on PBS in May. Guggenheim spent the last six months of his life making the film to honor fellow comrades in the 106th Infantry who died in Berga. The filmmaker had been away from his regiment recovering from an infection when they were captured. Carden says he is gratified for the film and the effort to keep the story alive. ''Nobody was interested in it for a long time,'' he said. But for all these years Carden has kept a shadowbox on his living room wall with reminders from that grim time. Along with his prisoner of war medals, the box displays gifts from his fellow prisoners: the rough-hewn wooden spoon he used to eat rotten soup, and a pocketknife he used to cut bread made from sawdust. Source: The Tennessean, 10/29/2003