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."
