Forgotten Photos Reunite Fraternity of Survivors

SIOUX CITY, Iowa —  He had seen six straight months of bloody battle and truckloads of frozen corpses, but that spring day when the weary American soldier saw the German slave labor camp, he shuddered.

Then he reached for his camera.

Vernon Tott and other U.S. troops had come to liberate the Ahlem labor camp in April 1945, but the guards had already fled. Left behind were dozens of prisoners--many younger than the 20-year-old GI--lying on straw mattresses crying for help or shambling outside in tattered clothes.

“I had no idea this was taking place in the world,” Tott says. “I was sick to my stomach.”

Capture this moment, he told himself. Show the folks back home these grim, ghostly images of war. So he pulled his Kodak from his shirt pocket and started snapping.

There were prisoners shaking off lice, pacing the dirt yard where bodies were stacked like discarded rags.

Click.

Bodies so emaciated you could count their ribs.

Click.

Faces with the hint, incredibly, of a smile.

Click.

Ahlem is just a footnote in the Holocaust, but for survivors--and for one veteran--it’s a place forever embedded in their memories.

Even so, life moves on, and over the decades Tott forgot about the photos.

Then, a half century later, he read a letter in The Railsplitter, newsletter for his 84th Infantry Division. It was from an Ahlem survivor. He wanted to thank his liberators. He also wanted to find the photos taken April 10, 1945.

“I am trying to put together the story of my survival for my children and grandchildren,” the writer said, “so that they may better understand what happened.”

Vernon Tott went to his basement and opened a shoe box. There, in black and white, were his 18 photos: the same suffering eyes, the same skeletal bodies.

The old soldier reached for his phone. The liberator was about to become acquainted with the liberated, the men who had walked through the gates of hell.

*

If a picture is worth a thousand words, Vernon Tott believes his are worth a worldwide search.

In the last three years, the 73-year-old retiree has turned sleuth, matchmaker and amateur historian, determined to track down Ahlem survivors--especially those in his pictures.

So far he has located 10 of the men he photographed as well as six others in a trail that has stretched from Israel to Canada to California, from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., to a historian in Germany.

He also has helped some of the tiny band of camp survivors find others they hadn’t even known existed.

“Everybody is put on earth for something, and I am an old man and there’s nothing else for me to do,” he says bluntly. “This is a good cause, and I’m making people happy by giving their past back to them.”

The men of Ahlem have, in turn, confided their life stories. They have sent him pictures. They have become pen and phone pals. They have formed a kind of fraternity with the man some call Mr. Vernon.

“I feel like there’s something special between us,” Tott says, sitting in his basement poring over a book he has assembled of their correspondence. “All the conversations, all the letters. They’re my friends.”

The sentiment seems mutual.

“My first words to Vernon were, ‘You were my godfather, you were my liberator,’ ” says Sol Bekermus, 71, who was photographed with his younger brother, Abe. “Tears came to my eyes to be able to talk with him.”

Tott’s photo captured the Bekermus boys squinting hopefully in the sun in front of a sign warning civilians and SS members against entering the disease-ridden camp. They are wearing street clothes, provided by the Red Cross after German guards had fled and before U.S. troops arrived.

“When I saw this photo, my stomach turned and my hair almost stood up,” adds Bekermus, a retired New Jersey sportswear manufacturer. “But I was thrilled to see there is something of my life the exact minute we were reborn. The Germans tried to destroy all the evidence. But these are the exact pictures. They cannot be destroyed.”

A Route to Rebirth

Tott located several Ahlem prisoners by writing the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which forwarded his letter to survivors in its registry. One contact led to another and another.

Faces became names, names of boys who became men, who reared families, who built businesses, who became grandfathers.

There’s Ben Berkenwald, a sad-eyed teen in the infirmary, one of four children, the only survivor in his family. He became a furrier.

There’s Henry Waks, now 70, who started a construction business in Toronto.

“I looked like hell,” he says of his picture. “But it showed me how lucky I am to be here. One of the reasons is people like Vernon.”

“It’s a very peculiar situation,” Waks adds. “You are ashamed of it, then you think, ‘Why should I be ashamed? The world should be ashamed.’ ”

And there’s Moniek Milberger, photographed at age 15 with a cigarette dangling from his lips--maybe even a cigarette provided by Tott. The GIs had dumped rations and cigarettes on the ground, fearful of contracting diseases.

“Sometimes when I think about that time, I have the feeling that it happened to somebody else,” says Milberger, a West Bloomfield, Mich., accountant whose father died in Ahlem. “These pictures put me in that place.”

And for his three children and eight grandchildren, the photographs offer a real-life illustration of the former horse stables where so many atrocities were committed: Hundreds starved, froze or were beaten to death with rifles and shovels as guards ordered others to sing to drown out the screams.

“It certainly makes it easier to explain to my family what the conditions are,” Milberger says. “How do you explain something like this? How can anyone even conceptualize it?”

Ahlem was the last stop on a road of doom that began for most in the Lodz ghetto in Poland, then Auschwitz, then finally the camp outside Hanover, Germany. About 1,000 prisoners, many just boys, dug tunnels in a rock quarry for an underground factory.

On April 6, 1945, with the Allies advancing, most were rounded up for a death march to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Those left behind were too sick to move.

On April 10, liberation day, some prisoners remained in hiding, fearing the departed guards would return.

Benjamin Sieradzki was near death when Tott snapped his picture. His body, racked by tuberculosis, typhoid and edema, had shriveled to 76 pounds. At 17, he was alone in the world--his parents, two sisters, aunts and uncles had all been murdered.

Sieradzki was pushing 70, a grandfather and retired engineer, when he wrote the letter to The Railsplitter that inspired Tott’s search.

“People say, ‘Aren’t you going to heal?’ I don’t want to heal,” Sieradzki says from his Berkeley home. The pictures, he adds, are “a symbolic memory of what happened to all my family and friends.”

“It’s almost like that was a different universe,” he says. “At first when I looked at them, there was sadness. But the next day, when I went back, there was an anger.”

Through Tott, Sieradzki has found comfort too. Others from the 84th Infantry have called or written, and he has been in touch with about a half-dozen Ahlem survivors he did not know back then.

“I thought I was by myself, an island,” he says. “But there are people who live and function very well, and they went through the same thing. . . . It’s a terrific experience after so many years to find out there are people who survived the camp. They feel like I do.”

Sieradzki even found an unusual bond with Tott. He once designed equipment for a beef-packing plant three miles away that put Tott’s employer, a rival meatpacker, out of business. Tott jokes that Sieradzki cost him his job.

These days, Tott speaks at schools, carrying his book of photos and letters--including a harrowing 38-page autobiography from Sieradzki--and his own historical research.

One letter is from Sam Gottesman, who also visits schools in the Pittsburgh area to talk about Ahlem and the Holocaust, an ordeal so painful he says he sometimes wishes he would die in his sleep.

The photos “give me legitimacy,” he says. “It does help, shall I say, to verify . . . that our minds are still working. Somehow we need to be reassured that it did happen but we survived. We can’t believe how and why we survived. It was sheer luck.”

Tott continues to look for other Ahlem survivors. “It’s my duty to find the rest of them,” he says.

Some survivors hope to meet him next year, perhaps at a reunion of the 84th Infantry. “I know there will be a lot of hugging and hand-shaking,” Tott says. “Those people are my heroes. You bet I’ll tell them.”

Meanwhile, he contents himself with a new set of photos. They are color snapshots of silver-haired men. One poses proudly in front of his house. Another stands tall next to his wife. A third sits peacefully with his granddaughter on his lap.

These are the men of Ahlem. And they’re smiling.

‘I thought I was by myself, an island. But there are people who live and function very well, and they went through the same thing.’