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It's Almost Shabbos
by Rosally Saltsman

Howard Margol was 21 years old in April 1945. He was a gunman with the 42nd Infantry Rainbow division of the U.S. 7th Army advancing through southern Germany. In the early morning hours of April 28, 1945, his unit moved into position near Cachau, a few kilometers north of Munich. Earlier that morning, Lt. Heinrich, the S.S. officer left in charge after his superiors had fled, surrendered Dachau to the Allied Forces.

Margol didn't know anything about the camp or concentration camps in general. But a smell reached him where his gun position was located. "It reminded me of when my mother used to burn the pinfeathers off the chickens before she'd cook them, the smell of the skin of the chicken being singed." A fellow soldier told him to come see the camp of over thirty thousand prisoners, the majority Jews. And he did. He remembers the thirty railroad boxcars packed with the corpses of the Jews who didn't make it to Dachau alive.

In July, Margol was on occupation duty in Austria. "We were ordered to take a group of Jews who had come out of the camps to Hofgastein and Badgastein," Austrian resort towns where it was hoped they would begin to recover. There, hot mineral water gushed out of the mountains and the elegance and refinement reflected no trace of the brutality that had created the barracks and crematoria of the camps.

The convoy of 150 army trucks each carrying 10-20 people had been traveling all day. All of a sudden, throughout the entire convoy of trucks, the soldiers heard yelling and screaming. The drivers stopped to see what the problem was. The time was sunset Friday afternoon.

The leaders of the group said, "It's almost Shabbos; we can't go on." Margol and the other soldiers who were Jewish said that they understood but that they'd be at their destination in twenty minutes, where warm beds and hot food was awaiting them.

"We can't go on. It's almost Shabbos."

The liberated prisoners left the trucks and sat down at the edge of the road. The army brought out blankets and tents and a field kitchen and prepared hot food for them. They remained there all Shabbos. After the sun went down the next day and the first stars came out, they loaded up the trucks again to complete their twenty-minute journey.

"I had the feeling that the main reason they wanted to keep Shabbos was that many of those Jews couldn't observe their Judaism the whole time they were in the camps and now that they were free, they wanted to practice everything as best they could. It gave them something to hold on to."

In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, Margol spoke of his experiences at a conference at Drew University in New Jersey. He told the story of the convoy held up for Shabbos. After many speakers, the 3500 member audience had begun growing restless but at the end of his speech, they gave him a standing ovation. "It had a great impact."

Who knows how many of those people from the convoy are still living? But they made a Kiddush Hashem of enormous proportions. They were no longer the victims of the barbaric Germany army. They weren't even taking orders from the American army. They were serving in Hashem's army.

Margol said, "It was a far greater emotional experience for me than Dachau itself."

 

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