It was April 11, 1945, when 19-year-old American soldier Abner Ganet stepped inside the barracks guardroom of Buchenwald.
The concentration camp was eerily silent. His eyes were drawn to several lamps with delicate shades, painted with beautiful butterflies and birds. Ganet moved closer to the lamps, drawn by the contrast between their beauty and the grim surroundings.
Then Ganet and his three battle-seasoned comrades ran outside to vomit. The lampshades were made of stretched human skin.
His 1st Infantry Division rousted four Nazi women hiding in another building. A pretty blond woman said the lamps were hers, showing no remorse or shame.
“I took my .45 out, and I cocked the pistol and I was going to shoot her,” Ganet said. “My company commander said: `You can’t do this. If you do, you’re as bad as she is.'”
He lowered the gun from her head. She was later tried and hanged, Ganet said.
Abner Ganet, now 76, did not want to discuss his stories of World War II trauma when he returned. He kept silent for 50 years, until 1995, when he met Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, who unlocked his horrifying memories of wartime. Ganet has been sharing his stories and pictures of Buchenwald and World War II at Chicago-area schools ever since.
For Ganet, talking to younger generations about the tragedy rather than standing by, holding past suffering at bay, feels even more relevant after Sept. 11. He thinks that a new generation of soldiers who may be facing death and horror in Afghanistan need to know that their experiences should not be locked inside.
Ganet understands that. Most veterans just want to get on with their lives. None of his compatriots wanted to dwell on the past when they had to worry about the future. He married, had kids, did his bit for the community, served as mayor of Elmhurst and never went back to what he had seen.
An alien world
Jim Fairhall, a Vietnam veteran who teaches war literature at DePaul University, said veterans who discuss the horror like Ganet does are a rarity.
“People who have been in combat are exposed to a world completely alien to anything seen by non-combatants,” Fairhall said. “So to try to describe it is, one, a difficult task … and, two, can call up emotions that they had repressed and maybe had not fully worked out themselves.”
But Wiesel, who has shown an unflagging willingness to brave the pain of memory, changed that. When the author and lecturer was honored in 1995 by Elmhurst College, where Ganet is a member of the board of trustees, the two met in an anteroom to the chapel.
“Wiesel asked if I had been in the war,” Ganet said. “I said yes, and he asked if I had seen any concentration camps. I said yes, Buchenwald. He said, `You liberated me. You saved my life.'” The fleeing Nazi army had slated Wiesel and the other Jewish children for the gas chamber on the April day that Ganet’s unit arrived.
Ganet had already landed in the D-Day invasion of Normandy and fought in the lead division across Europe. Wiesel, 16, had already lost his family, which he wrote about in his autobiographical novel, “Night.”
“Wiesel said I must tell my story,” Ganet said. “I’m not going to live forever. There are so many Holocaust deniers out there who say it’s all a figment of the Jews’ imagination. I was upset about being confronted with this reality.”
After the ceremony at Elmhurst, Vern Haase, a 1st Division photographer, offered Ganet copies of the pictures Haase had taken during the war. Later that day, a teacher at York High School asked Ganet to speak at York. He decided he must talk to young people as a firsthand witness.
“That’s the point I try to make to the kids,” Ganet said. “You’re talking to a guy who was there. Who saw it. Who cried. Who threw up. Who was appalled by man’s inhumanity to man.”
In the past six years, he has delivered his message about the Holocaust and shown slides of the disturbing pictures to high school students.
Wendy Schmiedeler, an English teacher at St. Ignatius College Prep, said Ganet added a personal level to the young people’s study of the Holocaust when he spoke there in March.
A Bettendorf, Iowa, teen who saw Ganet’s presentation said he considered skipping school that day to avoid the torture of a guest speaker. Afterward, he sent Ganet a letter assuring him that he was glad he went because Ganet was not boring. High praise from a teenager.
The story Ganet tells begins several grueling months before Buchenwald, when the 1st Infantry Division, nicknamed the “Big Red One,” landed at Omaha Beach in Normandy in the first D-Day wave on June 6, 1944. Ganet was deployed the next day to replace the soldiers who were killed or wounded.
With his unit, he worked his way through the French hedgerows, thick shrub fences that separated farmers’ fields and sometimes concealed German soldiers, until an artillery shell exploded nearby and lodged shrapnel in Ganet’s forehead.
After two days in the hospital, he returned to his unit in time to help capture Aachen, the first German city taken on the Western front.
Unit lost
In mid-February of 1945, Ganet’s captain lent him $50 to take three days of rest in Paris. When he returned, he found that his unit had been wiped out. He went from a one-stripe private first class to a platoon sergeant with five stripes, in command of four machine gun squads and two 60-mm mortar squads.
“I was promoted on the deaths of my friends,” Ganet said.
His unit approached Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945. He recalls the black smoke billowing out of smokestacks and the stench of burning flesh outside Buchenwald.
Ganet knew what was going on. He had joined the army partly because of rumors that had come as early as 1938 to his parents, who were deeply involved in Jewish concerns. But at 5 feet 9 inches and slightly built, the only Jewish kid in his outfit didn’t advertise his heritage with his battle mates, who were shocked by what they saw regardless of their background.
“We got in and saw the horrific piles of corpses that had not been buried but thrown into pits with lime,” Ganet said. “We saw all the equipment that the Nazis used to annihilate people. And there were no soldiers there. We saw no Germans.”
His senior officers sent trucks into Weimar to gather prominent citizens and bring them to Buchenwald to see the human carnage. Ganet still flashes a fiery bitterness, shaking slightly and raising his voice, when he speaks of the complicity of German citizens.
“My feeling was, and is to this day, that they knew about this,” Ganet said, referring to the Nazis’ wholesale slaughter of the Jews. He still refuses to go back to Germany.
Catching Nazi leaders
When the war ended, Ganet was stationed near Wurzburg, Germany.
He and another soldier, Bill Flannery, persuaded two sisters in a local tavern to go on a date. Before the date, the Americans planned a raid in the province to pick up all the Nazi leaders. Coincidentally, the two soldiers drew the girls’ last name for their part in the raid.
“We went to their house and rousted their father out of bed, handcuffed him and took him away,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to him. It didn’t make any difference because we sure as heck were not going to have dates with these two women.”
Ganet was guarding the Nuremberg jail when Hermann Goering, Hitler’s henchman, committed suicide. When Goering collapsed, Ganet rushed in, called the medics and smelled the cyanide.
Speaking of his experiences has been rewarding for Ganet as well as for his audiences. He unearthed an old address book in which, 50 years earlier, he had written the numbers of three war buddies and then stashed in his Army uniform pocket.
Though William Logan had just died, Ganet joined J.D. Williams and Chuck Smith at the 1st Infantry Division reunion in Nashville in August.
None of these veterans had ever discussed Buchenwald even with their families, Ganet said.
Ganet’s daughter, Marcie Siegel, 51, of Glen Ellyn, said he told some war stories but had kept Buchenwald from them.
“I really feel he was a survivor. And like many of the prisoners in the camps, their experiences were so horrific, they wanted to come back and forget it and make their lives fine again,” Siegel said.
