PHILADELPHIA, March 8 (UPI) -- A survivor of the Dachau death camp and the soldier who liberated him during World War II have met in Philadelphia after 67 years and become friends, they said.
On April 28, 1945, Romanian Jew Ernie Gross, then 16, was in a boxcar en route to Dachau's crematorium in Germany. The train was hit by American planes causing a day's delay in the train's arrival at the death camp.
A day later Gross waited in line to be burned to death.
"Then I saw the Germans throwing down their guns," Gross said. "I could not figure it out. I turned around, and the Americans were behind me," one of whom was 20-year-old Army Cpl. Don Greenbaum, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday.
Greenbaum, who'd been wounded the previous November, was back in combat in time for the Battle of the Bulge, the give-and-take battles that followed and the liberation of the death camps -- true to their name and emitting a smell never to be forgotten, he said.
"There was an odor we could not identify," Greenbaum said.
One of Greenbaum's overriding memories is of camp survivors reaching out in filthy rags, and his reply: "Ich bin ein Jude": "I am a Jew."
"I always wanted to meet somebody who liberated me, because I wasn't clear at the time," said Gross, who spoke Romanian and Yiddish as a child. "I knew it was April 29, because it was in the papers. But I wanted to talk to somebody about everything that was happening."
"I will never understand how a guy could go home and play with his children, and kiss his wife, and go to the movies or the theater, and go out the next morning and shoot people or push them into a gas chamber," Greenbaum said.
After two years in a displaced-persons camp a Jewish refugee agency sponsored Gross' entry into the United States, where he did odd jobs to make a living, the Inquirer said.
Greenbaum suffered bouts of battle fatigue and a flare-up of his combat wounds, then went to college and became a salesman.
Gross saw an article Greenbaum's wife, Shelley, wrote about his war experiences in the Jewish Exponent, a Philadelphia-area weekly newspaper, and contacted his liberator. The two met and said they became fast friends, discussing their commitment to share their stories anyplace they can gain an audience so that what took place will happen ... never again.
