Far reaching the beauty of nature today, whether a glance ahead or far away in some unknown town. Go out and enjoy. Lift your head up and stare ahead. Then maybe we can free up our thoughts on writing through the looking glass of life.
April is coming on the footprints of March. The month has special meaning as it brings back memories of the close of WWII. Our soldiers were in Europe to see first hand atrocities never witnessed or experienced in small town USA. I wrote once of a real-life soldier that became a Liberator in April. He waited long before he told his tale. I am attaching his story before it is forgotten.
Close to 86 years old, Private First Class John Degro of I Company, 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Division (Thunderbirds) had only been known as my favorite uncle and a godfather through baptism. Little was known of PFC Degro in the two towns in the early fifties, 5,000 miles apart, but on two separate continents each town would share the one man forever.
The town of Dachua and its inmates in the Dachua Concentration Camp in 1945 never learned the name of their liberator from the brief time he was there. They would refer to him for years as the “Unknown Solider.” Not until 1986, when Col. Howard Buechner, also a Thunderbird, wrote a book entitled Dachua: The Hour of the Avenger, a name was given to their liberator. In the early 1990’s, from the written accounts of the book and the stories my uncle would eventually share, media from Germany and the United States sought him out. PFC John Degro from the town of Newbury, in Northeast Ohio, would now be known as liberator, and provide witness for the Holocaust survivors of Dachua,
Dachua and Newbury are similar with pastoral landscapes and wonderland quality. Both share cobbled streets and dirt roads even today as in years past. Early morning mists would continued to drift daily from their lakes, with heavy sighs of peoples cries from events over sixty years ago. But for the town of Dachua, whose summit is dominated by the onion-dome of St Jakob’s and the Dachua Schloss palace, the quiet daybreak of retreating mists revealed to the private a more disturbing picture than his own town of Newbury.
For in the town of Dachua stands the Gedenkstatte, the memorial site, the KZ, as called by the residents. As Newbury resident, Private John Degro would discover on April 29, 1945, it was home to the horrors of the Dachua Concentration Camp. 221,930 so-called inmates passed through its gate, their footsteps crunching on gravel roads, clogging on cobbled streets for the town to hear. Even further in the retreating mists, beyond the camp compound and beyond Leitenberg hill, corpses of the concentration camp dead are buried.
There are the survivors of Dachua. Some Jewish inmates of the camp that would settle in the town after the war, and others that came across the 5,000 mile divide to settle in towns and cities of their liberators. The survivors and liberators would soon meet.
In the town of Newbury, a sun drenched, orange bricks form the church of St. Helen’s, hugging close to highway 87. Many gravel and dirt roads with clusters of mailboxes exit from the this highway. One twisting roads lead to a cottage above the dark pool of Little Lake Punderson. PFC John Degro claimed this peaceful spot before the outbreak of W.W.II. He would build a house for his young wife and daughter, And for many months he would live only in the completed basement.
The country would eventually call this blue-eyed young man away from his home building to fight in Europe. PFC Degro was assigned as a replacement in the Thunderbirds. Americans were fighting the Germans now. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and brought us in. My Aunt Martha, the private’s young wife then, affectionately known later in life as the golddust twin of my own mom’s, was herself of German descent. Raised by a strict, but loving German father, she had no idea what her husband would find in her father’s homeland. She could only wait with her other sisters and my mom who gave up husbands and boyfriends to the bloody game far away.
John Degro’s 45th Thunderbird division had started at Anzio in Italy with the 7th Army, and joined the 3rd Army with General George Patton. A kid from Woodhill Rd. in Cleveland, John was born of a much older father who lost his first wife quite young, leaving him the sole parent of a young family. Calling on relatives in Czechoslovakia for help, arrangements were made for the passage of a young, spirited girl. An impending marriage to the elder American Degro was arranged. A Czech girl in a strange new country would give birth to a future liberator of her European homeland.
On April 29, 1945, five miles out of Munich, Germany, private first class John Degro, the lead scout, and his eight-man squad received a radio call stating that they must stop at the
Dachau camp to secure it. The camp included a SS garrison, a SS training center and numerous prison barracks. Approaching the railroad gate into the SS section of the camp, he was instructed to shoot off the lock. The squad came upon a train of forty five cattle cars stopped on the tracks just outside the camp. The train had come from Auschwitz in Poland after a journey of thirty days. Unknown to Private Degro, the cars were filled with the corpses of 2,310 Hungarian and Polish Jews who had died from hunger and thirst. He slit open the side door of a boxcar and saw for himself countless bodies. “I was horrified,” he would tell later. “All these bodies were piled on top of each other, like cordwood.”
Such images of Hitler’s Anti-Semitism would be repeated in future nightmares for this young private, but it would be many years before he could talk about it. As a young soldier, Private Degro often wondered why he was fighting in this war. It all became very clear on that spring day in 1945. “I had to liberate the captives”, he would say. The starving prisoners within the compound were living skeletons. One such survivor who was liberated by Degro weighed just 82 pounds and near death. Unable to move from the corner of the room on April 29th, the young man regain his health and later in life went through great efforts to finally thank the soldier who saved his life. The survivor from Dachua had only been living 45 miles south of his liberator in Northeast Ohio.
Sixty years later, John Degro, who would not write about the events, things and people, but would continue his duty as liberator and serve as humble witness to those who will listen. “People should know what the hell was going on,” Degro has said.
During the war, John Degro became rank sergeant and participated in campaigns throughout central Europe. His many awards include the Purple Heart, Good Conduct Medal, Combat Infantry Badge and the World War II Victory Medal. His most recent honor, though, came from closer to home, from the town of Newbury. The Geauga County Veterans Service Commission and the Geauga County Department on Aging recently presented Mr. Degro with a plaque in honor of his dedication to the veterans of Geauga County. A member of the American Legion in Newbury, Mr. Degro has supported veterans and veteran program for 17 years.
But his biggest accomplishment, he will say, were having five daughters, and a 47-year marriage to his late wife, Martha, who died from cancer. “All the children are healthy,” he said. “That’s most important.”
Today, although legally blind and partially deaf, he is sole witness of Dachua in the sister town of Newbury. He served his town of Newbury as he did Dachua sixty years ago. He continues his role as witness, less we forget. He’ll tell his story when asked. He prays for the veterans and young soldiers, the new liberators, and he will always tell you, “War is hell," less we all forget.
On Memorial Day this year, you will find my uncle, once the proud private of W.W. II, still able to hold his rifle at 85 to salute and remember with other veterans the men who couldn’t come back to their home town. He will be standing close to the grave of his late wife, right off the highway in Newbury. His steps are short and slow, sometimes wobbly. He may have to be assisted this year as he marches with the other men. His arms will still carry the weight of the rifle. His bright blue eyes, now filmy, will pass lovingly over his wife’s grave, and his head will bend briefly remembering briefly his life with her. But he has never forgotten what, as a young private, he once saw in Dachua. John Degro will not let the world forget either.
Jacob Hennenberg said why we all cannot forget, “if we of today forget what happened to others yesterday, it could happen to us tomorrow.”
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