May 24



USA//MISSISSIPPI:

Small world: Holocaust survivor finds liberator a Mississippian
Puckett soldier set Jackson's Metz free 58 years ago


Every year when commemoration services for Holocaust victims roll around,
Gilbert Metz is grateful to be alive. He puts the horror of Auschwitz and
Dachau further behind him, no matter that his prisoner number remains
tattooed on his arm.

But on this April 29 a Holocaust commemoration here was very special.

Some 58 years ago, April 29, 1945, 11 a.m., a gaunt, emaciated 16-year-old
Gilbert Metz was liberated from the Nazis' dreaded concentration camp at
Dachau. Moreso, it was special because a Mississippi soldier had been one
of his liberators.

Poignantly, the Mississippian who freed him exactly 58 years before came
to stand up with Gilbert Metz at a Holocaust Memorial service at Temple
Beth Israel.

Chester Burnham, now a leathery 85, came up from his home near Puckett to
share the moments of the touching service at Beth Israel, and receive the
thanks of the Jackson Jewish community by having a tree in his honor
planted in Israel.

He had been a corporal in the 932nd field artillery unit, a part of
Patton's army. The Battle of the Bulge was only a few months behind them.

It was more or less accidental that Burnham volunteered on April 29, 1945,
to take a Jeep driver to check out the Dachau camp, some 10 miles away
from where his unit was bivouacked. He had no idea of the unspeakable
horror he would find.

Two or three Nazi soldiers near the camp gate "high-tailed it when they
saw us coming," says Burnham, and "I went inside. What I saw just tore me
up. Dead bodies were stacked up all over the place. And a few, I could
see, were still alive . . . just skin and bones."

Amazingly, Gilbert Metz was one of those alive, and Burnham remembers
taking down his name. "And the look on his face I will never forget," he
adds.

In later years through newspaper articles when Burnham learned about Metz,
now living in Mississippi, "that name, because of the New York Mets, came
back to me." The two hooked up by telephone.

Burnham said after his shocking discovery inside Dachau he took notes. "I
could do nothing other than head back to my unit, report my findings so
that a team of medics could go back and take over." It took several days
longer for the camp and the survivors to be decontaminated before they
could be removed.

Metz' life is a complicated journey beginning from childhood in French
Alsace-Lorraine before it was overrun by the Nazis in 1940 and all Jews
had to flee for their lives.

Metz' family wound up in the French town of St. Die with Gilbert and his
sister for three years, poetically, attending a Roman Catholic school
before the family along with all other Jews in town were arrested in 1943
by the Gestapo and shipped off to concentration camps.

Shuffled from one death camp to another, somehow he stayed alive, losing
his mother and father to the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz along the way.
What happened to his sister, four years younger than he, the Lord only
knows.

You've got to ask him: How did you survive?

"I was just lucky," says the 74 year-old Metz. He was once taken for dead,
and fellow prisoners in the typhus-ravaged barracks stripped him naked and
tossed him out in the snow.

No doubt he had to be clever. He used his small size to advantage. And
what served him in good stead was that he could speak High German, an
asset that Prussian officers respected.

"If I hadn't spoken High German as well as I did, I don't think I would
have survived," he says.

Water. Above all, even food, Metz learned, you couldn't live without it.
Without water you could go insane. You would fight for it. Even die for
it.

Metz recalls that dozens of thirst-maddened Jews packed into a railroad
cattle car were dumped into the yard of one Nazi prison camp. They
desperately rushed to a fountain on the camp ground to devour precious
water.

From guard towers, Nazi riflemen opened fire. Dozens of prisoners fell
dead.

Metz somehow escaped being hit. Early the next morning when he peeked out
of his barracks, he spotted 100 bodies strewn around the fountain.

His parents both dead, after World War II he was allowed to come live with
an aunt in Natchez who long ago had emigrated to the U.S.

Metz graduated from Natchez High, went on to Tulane University, but was
drafted into the U.S. military during the Korean War and sent to Korea.
Again he survived.

Rather than finish in law at Tulane as he planned, Metz came back to
Mississippi, moved to Jackson and launched his own business as a women's
apparel and dry goods wholesaler, selling to smaller independent stores.

He built up the business over 25 years until his wife's health began to
fail badly. Two years ago he retired.

Now Metz is fighting a life-and-death battle completely different from
surviving the Holocaust: prostate cancer.

A few months ago, his prognosis to survive this battle looked less than
promising.

But Leuprogel, a super-expensive medicine that comes, ironically, from
Germany, has given him new hope to hang around for awhile. Once a month, a
dose costs $575.

(source: Clarion-Ledger, May 11)