at Edinboro
University of Pennsylvania as part of the university's Holocaust Remembrance Week in 2000.Eisenberg's Jewish religion and heritage made his experience all the more profound.
"You didn't
have to be Jewish to have been affected by what you saw at Flossenberg," he told me. "It affected all of us, these emaciated people we treated, some dying even while under our care. But since I was
the only Jew with my unit at that time, and since the others involved in our effort knew I was Jewish, it was extremely emotional for me."
In fact, as a medical officer in the 90th Infantry Division, Eisenberg's
non-Jewish pals used to make friendly jokes about his Jewishness as the division advanced from Normandy through France and into Germany.
"They'd make jokes about sending Hitler a bomb with my name on it."
Medicine or music?
Eisenberg's story didn't start with Nuremberg or D-Day or even the Army.
It goes back to Erie and the days immediately before the U.S. entry into World War I, the Great
War "to end all wars," as it was then called.
He was born Aug. 30, 1916, the son of Harry and Frances Bukstein Eisenberg. His father had been born in Russia, his mother in Poland. Both came to
the United States in the 1890s. The senior Eisenberg was a State Street merchant, running the Globe clothing shop between 12th and 13th Streets for many years.
After attending Longfellow Elementary
School, Gridley Junior High School and Strong Vincent High School, the young Eisenberg enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania as a psychology major.
"I think I always knew I would go into
medicine," he said, "probably since high school."
Eisenberg was an outstanding musician and a career in music was not entirely ruled out during his formative years. "Music has always been a big and
important part of my life."
Although he chose medicine, he still plays the piano well, but because of arthritis, not as much as he'd like.
With a degree in psychology, Eisenberg entered Penn's
School of Medicine, earning his M.D. in 1942, then serving an internship at Hamot Hospital in 1943.
Although he would continue to treat patients, Eisenberg specialized in pathology because it was there he
believed he could make his greatest contribution to medicine.
"I always had a great interest in helping people, so I preferred not to just work in a lab. But pathology represents the truly
scientific aspects of medicine. It represented not just treating diseases, but actually helping to find cures for diseases. Some of the great advances in medicine have been provided by pathology," he said.
Eisenberg would go on to become the chief of pathology at Saint Vincent Health Center, the president of the Erie County Medical Society and the co-founder (with Dr. John Fust) of the Erie
Community Blood Bank.
Those events and accomplishments were still years away. It was 1943, a fateful year for the young doctor. The war raged around the globe and would soon envelop his own world. That June, the
medical intern married Mina Berenstain. A month later he was called away to active duty as a medical officer.
In the Army
"I had joined the Medical ROTC while in medical school and received a
commission as a 1st lieutenant in the Reserves upon graduation," he said.
In July 1943, Eisenberg went through basic training at Carlisle Barracks, then had five months of additional training with a
separate medical battalion at Madison Barracks in New York. From there, he went to the Elkins, W. Va., maneuver area, where he took part in mountain exercises, including climbing and rappelling.
Eisenberg then was sent to Fort Dix, N.J., the Army's staging area for overseas deployment. He was assigned to a collecting company in the 315th Medical Battalion, which set sail for England in March 1944 as part
of the 90th Infantry Division.
"As soon as we got there, we began to prepare for the big event — D-Day. At that time, we knew the invasion was being planned, but little else. We didn't
know where or when it would come."
Neither did the Nazis.
Three months later, on June 6, 1944, with Eisenberg aboard a Liberty ship in the middle of the English Channel, the Allied forces
launched their invasion of the European mainland at Normandy.
"We could hear the fighting," he recalled. Three days later, on June 9, Eisenberg landed at Utah Beach as part of the 358th Regimental Combat
Team. As part of the combat team, he was to be one of the doctors treating the wounded. It was called D-plus three and was the last day on which U.S. servicemen and servicewomen were counted as being part of
Invasion Force Arrowhead.
Eisenberg's unit reached shore in a landing craft while under fire from German guns.
"The next day, we attacked through the Normandy hedgerows and launched
combat operations that continued to VE day in May 1945." His division would see 318 days of battle in five campaigns that took the officers and men from Normandy through France, to the Battle of the Bulge,
to Bastogne, and finally through Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Those first days in Normandy were brutal for all participants of the Allied landing. There was fierce resistance by the German army, and
the invading force had to punch its way into the interior of France. Casualties numbered in the thousands.
"Our units were decimated," Eisenberg said. "There was every kind of wound imaginable. It
was awful, but there was simply no time to even think about it. We were all scared. We saw a lot of combat fatigue."
At one point, his medical unit set up a "Collecting Station"
in a Normandy farmhouse."The civilians were pretty much gone at that point," Eisenberg
said. "So we used a farmhouse.."
'Dirty, disheveled, stricken..'
Vogue Magazine war correspondent Lee Miller arrived to cover the Normandy invasion.
In her story the "Collecting
Station," where Eisenberg and other medical officers worked day and night to treat the wounded, she wrote:
"We passed litter-bearing Jeeps, the wounded in racks across the hood… There were lots of things,
touching, poignant, or queer, I wanted to photograph, but we couldn't stop…
"There were fewer and fewer inhabited houses as we went on and on, until we reached a deserted but intact row of gray cottages. A
hospital flag hung from a telegraph pole and an ambulance was parked back-end to a door...a medical soldier was reading that morning's Stars and Stripes…there were roses, hollyhocks, bumblebees. Until there was a
sudden savage noise of firing, I couldn't realize that I was less than one and one-half miles from the fighting.
"The first room, piled high with medical supplies, opened into a wall-papered parlour. Bandages,
tacked to the ceiling, curled down like flypaper rolls. A group of men knelt around a white-turbaned figure on a litter. No one noticed there were strangers.
"This is a Collecting Station. It is the vital
heart-point in the branching system of life-saving. Here the front-line diagnosis is checked, wounds are re-dressed, splints fitted, and plasma given to strengthen shock cases for further travel.
"Those needing
the most urgent surgical care are forwarded immediately to the nearest field hospital. Others who can travel a few miles farther are sent to an evacuation hospital.
"The head-bandaged casualty on the floor was
placed back in the nearly-full ambulance, which sped left to an Evac. Another ambulance arrived from the right, and litters were swiftly transferred to the parlor floor. The wounded were not 'knights in
shining armor,' but dirty, disheveled, stricken figures … uncomprehending. They arrived from the front line Battalion Aid Station with lightly laid-on field dressings, tourniquets, blood-soaked slings … some
exhausted and lifeless. ...
"A badly mangled sergeant was turned over on his chest; his clothes were cut away, he was covered, ticketed and rushed to a Field Hospital. …
"A few 'walking
wounded' sat around the wall. One man had been dazed, slightly amnesiac. He was better already, and thought he'd go back. …''
Miller's photographs, some of them showing Dick Eisenberg,
appeared in the Sept. 15, 1944, issues of Vogue.
'Nice place, Bud.'
It was the same farmhouse where one night the occupants smelled a strong odor of what turned out to be German
gunpowder.
"But everyone thought we were being gassed," Dr. Eisenberg said. There was a mad dash for gas masks for the patients and medical officers. But when the dogs in the house —
obviously without benefit of gas masks — appeared normal and healthy, the doctors realized it was merely a false alarm and the masks came off.
By the time the 90th Infantry Division had pushed out of
Normandy, 1st Lt. Eisenberg had advanced to the rank of captain.
After the division broke out of Normandy, units of the 90th were ordered to hold a bridge en route to Paris.
"We were bombed and shelled. There
was a single line of vehicles moving to the bridge. I had discovered a wounded civilian and put him in the Jeep and was taking him back to the Aid Station when I was stopped by a major." It was against
regulations at the time for military personnel to transport civilians in military vehicles.
The major ordered Eisenberg to report to the commanding officer to be disciplined.
"He told me to report to General Patton!"
But when the major later learned Eisenberg was a doctor helping a wounded civilian, the order was rescinded "and I never did get another opportunity to meet General Patton."
Eisenberg easily recalls the liberation of Paris.
"The French people went wild!"
But despite the liberation, the war was not over. There would be much more fighting, many more wounded to care for, some
of them German soldiers who had been captured as prisoners of war.
"It wasn't easy communicating with the Germans (POWS). I did my best with some Yiddish and some pretty poor pig-German. But one
night as I was making rounds with a flashlight, doing my best to communicate with these patients, a German soldier looked directly at me and said in perfect English, 'Nice place you got here, Bud.' I was
stunned. But then I learned he had grown up in the United States. His parents were from Germany and when it appeared there would be a war, they moved the family back there."
In late 1944, when the Germans
launched a massive counter-offensive in what become the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenberg was there as the 90th Infantry Division swung around and headed for the besieged city of Bastogne and was among the troops to
relieve the 101st Airborne Division, which had held out against several German Panzer divisions.
"We relieved the Aid Station there," Eisenberg said. "The Aid Station was located in a convent and one of the nuns
there gave me a (religious) medal."
As the war in Europe moved closer to an end, with Americans advancing on Germany from the west, and the Soviets from the east, Eisenberg's unit found itself in southern Germany that
spring, near the city of Flossenberg.
Greens, Browns and Blacks
It was April 20 when the front-line troops discovered the Flossenberg concentration camp.
The camp was not an
extermination camp, though it might just as well have been. Living conditions were sub-human. The 15,000 prisoners were only fed a form of turnip soup; they were forced to work until they died. Keeping the
camp population replenished was a major task for the Nazi captors because 15,000 died each year from starvation or typhus fever.
"The concentration camp had held 15,000 prisoners at one time, about half of
them Jewish. The others were criminals or political prisoners," Eisenberg said. "This was not an extermination camp, though thousands died each year. It was a work camp for the Nazis. They worked them and
starved them until they were dead, then burned their bodies in a crematorium."
The 90th Infantry Division found 1,500 inmates the Germans had left behind. They were in a terrible physical and emotional state.
Many were near starvation.
There were other stark reminders of what life had been like for the prisoners.
Eisenberg saw the bullet-scarred wall where defiant prisoners had been executed.
He
remembers the 20-foot high pile of shoes worn by those who had died while working at the camp.
And he viewed with shock, revulsion, horror and utter sorrow the crematorium used for disposing the
bodies of the dead.
Eisenberg talked about his job at the camp, where he had two to three dozen people under his care.
"Our goal was to treat them and get them evacuated. All we had to feed
them was Army field stuff, field rations," Eisenberg said. "And the medical supplies and conditions for treatment were not the best, either. We just tried to get them fluids, coffee and some K-rations.
You need to be very careful when feeding the starving; it's almost an art. We just wanted to get them out of there as fast as possible."
For some of those who had survived the brutal conditions
at Flossenberg to this point, it was too late. They died while under treatment.
Major Bill Falvey, a regimental intelligence officer and friend of Eisenberg's, was one of the first into the camp.
In 1982, Falvey
wrote in a speech to be delivered during a Holocaust memorial service at South Bend, Indiana, "When our front line soldiers approached the camp, they were given orders not to go into the camp. The SS Guards
took off just prior to the arrival of our troops and the troops were informed that the trustees were keeping the camp closed for the good of the inmates and they would appreciate it if we could get a doctor there as
soon as possible. The SS marched off with most of the prisoners about three days before our arrival.
All prisoners wore striped uniforms and were identified from the color of the stripe of paint on the
back of their uniforms — green, brown or black.
"When we arrived the camp was still locked up and the Greens (trustees) were in charge. The Greens were bank robbers, murderers, rapists, etc. …It seems to
be that the camp had about 50 percent Jewish prisoners and about 50 percent political prisoners from France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia."
Falvey said that the political prisoners were called "Browns,"
while those labeled as "social prisoners" (the Jews) were called "Blacks."
"It was a terrible place when 40 to 60 were dying every day from starvation and typhus. Conditions were awful. The incinerator
was in operation burning the bodies. And there were bodies waiting their turn.
"The sights that I saw and the smells, turned my stomach. I could not take it and really shortened the inspections because I
was getting sick."
It's clear Eisenberg has a difficult time talking about what he saw at Flossenberg.
"Bill Falvey said it best," he said.
A part of history
Eisenberg said, "My job
was to take care of inmates, speaking in pig-German or Yiddish to communicate with them the best I could. Many of them told me they were anxious to go to Palestine and not the United States. They seemed to
think that something like the Holocaust could happen again here, but not in Palestine.
"I told them that I, too, was Jewish. It was emotionally intense all of the time." Since the prisoners were only
with Eisenberg for a day or so, there was no opportunity to develop a true doctor/patient relationship in the sense we have come to understand such relationships. As a result, he could not later follow up on their
health or whereabouts."
The liberation of Flossenberg ended quickly, and once again the 90th Division was on the move.
Later, not far away at Sucice, Czechoslovakia, Eisenberg helped to
restore a vandalized synagogue.
"There was a bridge over a river nearby that had signs on both ends," he said. The sign facing west said "Welcome Yanks." The east-facing sign read:
"Welcome Russians." It was a sign that the war was nearly over in Europe and Eisenberg's 90th Infantry Division had seen it all. But at great cost. The road from the beaches of Normandy to the
liberation of the Flossenberg concentration camp had been long and bloody and with horrendous losses.
In 11 months of combat, the division, which started with a strength of 15,000, saw 3,883 killed in action,
14,882 wounded or injured in combat, and 2,660 captured by the enemy. Total casualties were 21,425, meaning there had to be many replacements to keep the division strength at 15,000.
Eisenberg was awarded
the Bronze Star, the Invasion Arrowhead for the Normandy landing, and five Battle Stars. He was promoted to major before being mustered out in December 1945.
As for the top Nazis convicted of crimes
against humanity at Nuremberg War Criminals Trial, all are dead. Some were hanged, some took their own lives before the death sentence could be carried out, and others died of natural causes after having spent
much of the remainder of their lives in prison.
Fifty-five years after the liberation of Flossenberg, Eisenberg joined other camp liberators and Holocaust survivors to share stories of a time that
forever changed the lives of those who lived through, or were touched, by the Holocaust.
"It was a time none of us will ever forget, a time no one should ever forget. I feel fortunate, not just to
have been a part of history, starting with the Normandy landing, but to have been a part of ending the horror and the tragedy that was the Holocaust for so many."
Up Close
Name: Richard B. Eisenberg, M.D.
Born: In Erie, Aug. 30, 1916
Parents: Harry and Frances Bukstein Eisenberg
Brother: Marvin J. Eisenberg (deceased)
Wife: Mina Berenstain Eisenberg (married June 1943)
Children: Richard Eisenberg; Emily Kuhn; Mary Jane Eisenberg
Occupation: Physician, with specialty in pathology (retired)
Lasting medical accomplishment: Co-founder of Community Blood Bank
