A Protestant Chaplain

My father, Graydon E. McClellan, was a chaplain in the Army during World War II, serving from June 1944-June 1946. Most of his time was spent in the European Theater. One of the reasons my father entered the Army was that he had read about what Hitler was doing to the Jews, about the trains full of people on their way to the Work Camps and the Death Camps. My father was a pacifist, believing that there were other ways to solve the problems of this world than the taking up of arms; he had actually applied for conscientious objector status at one point.  But the brutality of the Nazis and the Hitler regime shook his beliefs. Regardless of his commitment to peaceful solutions, despite his deferment as an ordained minister, Dad joined the Army, first attending Chaplain School at Harvard, then being sent to Camp Hulen in Blessing, Texas, as part of the 558th Battalion, and finally being shipped with his unit to England, then the Netherlands, and eventually Germany.

During the time Dad was stationed in Bayreuth, Germany (July-September1945), his new commanding officer, Lt. Col. Sack, who was Jewish and a lawyer from Philadelphia in civilian life, took Dad into town to meet children and adult survivors of the Eastern Nazi camps, who were passing through town on the UNRA “displaced persons” route from the East to “uncertain destinations.”

I have pictures of my father and these survivors that were taken that day. Until I got the story behind them, I was always puzzled by the way the adults and children look. They look well-fed for the most part, wearing clean clothes, as they gather around my father in his Army Captain’s uniform, smiling at the camera. The photos are such a contrast to the usual camp survivors pictures—emaciated adults and children with sunken eyes, dressed in prison camp striped pajamas. It was only when I realized that the people in my father’s pictures had been liberated from the camps five months before that I understood. They had been fed and given clean clothes. They had been, for the most part, treated kindly by the Allied troops who had liberated them and the relief groups who tended to their immediate needs. Behind those smiling faces, though, were the nightmarish memories of torture, humiliation, and depravation at the hands of the Nazis and the fear of a future of homelessness, being moved from one place to another in search of a permanent place to begin a new life.

The blond boy on my father's lap was saved
when a gentile Ukranian said the boy was his own.

The girl on the right, Helenka, was saved on the brink of the gas chamber,
due to a flippant, and courageous, remark to a Nazi Guard

A few years ago, I found an article my father had written about that encounter and submitted to Life magazine in September 1945. The article was titled “Did Hitler Win?” The provoking title was my father’s way of startling people into the realization that the war wasn’t truly over as long as the thousands of survivors of Hitler’s relentless persecution remained homeless. Perhaps because of modesty, perhaps because of Army regulations, my father used the byline "By a Protestant Chaplain."

My father was shocked at his own country’s resistance to taking in these “displaced persons”—a term that seemed euphemistic to my father, given how they had come to be “displaced"—as well as that of other countries. In the article, my father writes about the refugees he met. Dad spent the day listening to their stories, later attempting to summarize their individual experiences in the article, hoping to put  names and faces on this humanitarian crisis. Dad listened as they shared their stories of the horrors of the camps. In the article, he personalizes the story of these Jewish survivors by talking about various individuals: Helenka, Vergina, Felix, the “Jewish chaplain’s brother,” Widow Lair, Leon, and Maria. He also mentions Dr. Paul Heller “whom I met later that day.” Dad writes “How I loved the man!” but then crosses it out, probably because he felt it was too personal for an article.*

My father was trying to bring to light the miserable uncertainty the surviving Jews faced in trying to find a home. Dad submitted the article to Life Magazine in September 1945, but he received a rejection letter. In the letter, the editors of Life point out that they’ve already covered the horrors of the concentration camps in previous issues, completely ignoring the point of my father’s article, which is “How can we turn our backs on these homeless refugees now, after all they’ve been through?”

The article ends with the “Buchenwald Song,” in English translation. The lyrics were written by Fritz Löhner-Beda, a Viennese satirist, who was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and later deported to Auschwitz, where he died in the ovens. The melody was composed by Hermann Leopoldi, another Austrian Jew imprisoned in Buchenwald; Leopoldi later managed to escape the camp, thanks to a large bribe arranged by his wife, and he emigrated to the United States.

My Father' Notes on the Origins of the Buchenwald Song

While the song was commissioned by the Nazi commandant for the camp, and the prisoners were forced to sing it over and over for the amusement of their captors, the Jewish prisoners made it their song. As Buchenwald prisoner Robert Siewert later recalled, “When we sang it, we always put all our hatred and conviction into it.” [The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust, edited by Jerry Silverman, Syracuse University Press, 2001; p. 15]

Channeling their bitter sorrow and anger into their singing of the song, the prisoners often put a special emphasis on the word free in the last line of the chorus.

O Buchenwald, I cannot forget you

Because you are my fate.

Only he who left you knows how wonderful liberty is.

Yet, Buchenwald, we don’t lament and complain;

And whatever may be our future

We shall say “yes” to life,

For there will arrive the day when we shall be free.

The above translation was done by Maria (last name unknown), one of the people mentioned in my father’s article. My father refers to Maria in a later letter to my mother, dated October 13, 1945: “When we came down from C battery day before yesterday, we brought Maria down to Degendorf, about sixty miles down from the river, where she is going to try to get help to get into Czech. to find her grandmother, the only one of her family left. She had finished the translating for me and she had also written down the words and the music of the Buchenwald song. She wrote down the melody herself and tried it on the piano and said it sounded right. I can’t vouch for it. I gave her $10 (equal to $40 for her) and some cigarettes for the translating. I also gave her the trench coat I got [in] Albuquerque, for she had no coat. It had shrunk rather badly, and Col. Sack had given me an unlined trench coat anyway.”

While the perspective of the article my father wrote—“Did Hitler Win?”—is Christian-centric, and some of the language a bit dated sounding, my father’s compassion for the people he is writing about and his righteous indignation against the Allies’ failure to respond by opening their doors resonate today, as we once again deal with a humanitarian crisis of refugees being turned away rather than being offered sanctuary.

After the war, my father spent the rest of his life studying and writing about the Holocaust. He never forgot the stories of the brave survivors he met that day in Bayreuth in 1945, and he was deeply committed to trying to make sure that others never forgot.

Below is a draft of the article my father submitted to Life. The handwritten edits were incorporated in the final version.

*Dr. Paul Heller is indeed another story, which I will write about another time. Dr. Heller survived not only Auschwitz and Buchenwald but the limbo of life as a displaced person in post-war Germany.  He managed to find entry into the United States, where he became a well-respected doctor in Chicago. His story is beautifully told in his daughter Caroline Heller's book Reading Claudius: A Memoir in Two Parts.

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Claudius-Memoir-Two-Parts/dp/0385337612?ie=UTF8&keywords=reading%20claudius&qid=1462513879&ref_=sr_1_1&refinements=p_n_feature_browse-bin%3A2656020011&s=books&sr=1-1