Saturday, January 4, 2014

Holocaust Survivor Meets Her Liberator, 70 Years Later

Extraordinarily beautiful. 

"...Joe Barbella was serving in the 11th Armored Division. Because he had learned to type at Central High School in Newark, when he was drafted into the Army, he was quickly assigned to be a record keeper for the division’s medical unit, he said"

"On May 5, 1945, U.S. soldiers from the 11th Armored Division would cross the Linz border in Austria and liberate Mauthausen. Barbella wouldn’t enter the camp with the medical unit until the day after it was liberated, he said."

"When we got there, we saw all these people were skin and bones," Barbella said."

"Kreuzman said she remembers lying down just outside the camp’s crematorium when the soldiers arrived. She heard the words: "You’re free."

"She fainted and a soldier carried her to a field hospital, where doctors would start nursing her back to health, she said."