LeRoy “Pete” Petersohn carried a lifetime of trauma from his experiences in World War II.
As a medic in Gen. Patton’s Third Army, he saw horror on the battlefield and was himself injured in the Battle of the Bulge when his Jeep was hit by German artillery.
But what caused him to endure PTSD throughout much of his 87 years was what the Aurora man witnessed as one of the first liberators through the doors of Mauthausen extermination camp in Austria.
Pete’s story has been chronicled several times in this column after he opened up in his later years about those atrocities and again when he was reunited six decades later with the newborn he helped save at the notorious Mauthausen Concentration Camp.
It’s a compelling narrative that’s also been featured in several books. And at 6 p.m. last Sunday, this incredible tale of good triumphing over evil was featured on “60 Minutes.”
The iconic CBS television news show focused on how three pregnant mothers lived to give birth in this last major death camp to be liberated, and how their babies were saved by the U.S. Army medics – especially Petersohn, who spent an entire day carefully lancing and cleaning the infected wounds of a tiny 3-week-old infant.
That baby is now retired research scientist Hana Berger Moran who, along with a second infant, emergency room Dr. Mark Olsky, born in an open coal wagon on the way to the death camp, were reunited with Pete at his home not long before he died in 2010 from brain cancer.
It’s a tale that I hope will someday play out on the big screen and one that was shared on the Paramount Theatre stage in 2016 with Moran and Olsky, as well as Wendy Holden, author of “Born Survivor,” and Pete’s youngest son Brian Petersohn of Montgomery, who has spent considerable time and energy making sure what his father witnessed at the camp will continue to be told through the generations.
It was last March, not long before he and those now 80-year-old “babies” – Moran, Olsky and Eva Clarke – got together at the Humanitarian Awards Dinner for the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center that Brian learned CBS was interested in their story.
Soon after, veteran correspondent Lesley Stahl met with Petersohn at the Martini Banquet Hall in Yorkville, where filming took place as the two went through Pete’s scrapbooks that showed dozens of photos he took inside Mauthausen, including pile after pile of skeletal bodies stacked against walls.
As graphic as those photos were, Pete always insisted they did not convey the full inhumanity – scorched heat from recently used crematorium furnaces and the smell of decay from emaciated prisoners, some of whom died right before the young medic’s eyes.
For as long as Brian Petersohn could remember, after looking through those books, his dad would always ask, “I wonder what happened to the baby” he tried to save. Pete finally got that answer in 2003 when Hana Moran located him and the two met a couple years later at the 60th anniversary of the Mauthausen Camp liberation.
Fast forward 20 years to last spring when Brian and his two sons Josh and Jake “surprised the babies” in Europe for the 80th celebration of the camp’s liberation, where Stahl interviewed him again, including in the motor pool, where Pete had first entered Mauthausen on May 5, 1945.
That celebration – which drew over 20,000 people, including some high European officials – was extremely emotional, said the younger Petersohn, who got another “unexpected surprise” at Gusen I Concentration Camp, which his dad helped liberate before Mauthausen.
There, Brian met a volunteer who, with no introduction, asked if he was a Petersohn. When he said yes, she told him that when she gives tours of Mauthausen in English, “I always use your father’s voice,” taken from the 2003 Mauthausen Survivor Project, to help convey the story of the unspeakable brutalities he encountered.
Anyone who knew Pete would understand why he’d have mixed emotions about all this attention his story is now getting. He was a humble young man who always seemed to have a smile on his face when he left his job in the mailroom at The Beacon-News to go to war. Before returning home, he sent a letter to wife Dorothy describing the atrocities inside the camp and insisted it be published in this newspaper, where he eventually spent his entire career.
In a second segment that ran on the show’s online “60 Minutes Overtime,” Brian Petersohn became emotional as he read from this Beacon-News letter, and Stahl appeared genuinely shocked by the photos Pete took that backed up every word he had documented.
The young soldier’s insistence that this account get published was not about recognition but record, said Brian, adding that his father remained deeply troubled by Holocaust deniers who, even after this “60 Minutes” show ran, tried to flood the comment section with their bad faith claims and recycled conspiracy theories.
Petersohn, whose phone “blew up” with positive calls right after the program aired on Sunday, insists those extremist views are the reason his dad’s story must continue to be told.
It’s not about praise, he insisted, but “proof.”
“Do you think of your father and what he did as heroic?” Stahl asked Petersohn in the final moments of that additional online interview.
His response: “I’m gonna say yes, but then again, I know how humble he was. It was just what he was supposed to do.”
dcrosby@tribpub.com
