Auschwitz, Dachau, and The One Mr. Corso Helped Liberate
When I returned home from the Army, stationed in West Germany during the Cold War until the Wall (Iron Curtain) came down, I worked the summer at a pizza shop in my old neighborhood until I left for my first semester of college.
A childhood friend and I were the pizza delivery guys for the night. But the night was slow. We hauled up in a booth tucked out of the way and drank coffee. It really must have been slow because Mr. Corso, the owner, joined us with his signature pizza pie.
As we dug in, he asked what conversation he was interrupting. Eric said that I just told him about my visit to the first of Hitler’s Nazi concentration camps—Dachau, near Munich, Germany.
“Oh, yeah, what was that like?” He asked.
Eric and I grew up in the neighborhood, getting into more than our share of mischief. We had reputations as “fun guys.” But I put my slice of “za” down and gave an honest and vulnerable answer.
My entire Army unit went on this tour of Dachau while we were in Munich for cross-training with German troops. Most of us were 18-20 years old and knew this would be a “dark tourism” experience, but nothing prepared us for what we were about to see. Every one of us felt the eeriness, and it was much heavier than anyone could have imagined. I think in the hours we spent navigating horror after horror, we lost an innocence we had when we arrived. The tour’s crescendo left us slack-jawed, staring at the actual ovens used in the crematorium to burn God knows how many bodies of the poor souls who suffered at the hands of absolute evil there. Our hearts were so heavy, not a word was spoken, even well after we were free to walk around outside. The stories, the ashen remnants, everything, were a lesson we would carry the rest of our lives.
“I mean, Mr. Corso, we were seeing something decades after the fact. It was a concentration camp, but not one of the major extermination camps. Could you even imagine what it must have been like to be there WHEN this was happening?”
“No way! I can’t wrap my mind around it!” Eric interjected.
“I can. I was there, then,” Mr. Corso said, measuredly.
He led with what it was like to storm the beaches of northern Europe and then march through Europe during World War II. He really piqued our interest. Now, to us, this was just sweet ole, Mr. Corso. But the stories he told of that invasion made our hair stand on end. Eric’s cigarette turned into one long ash still in the shape of a cigarette. His hand never moved, and he never took his eyes off the old man.
He then told us that the Allied forces pretty much had no idea what was going on behind enemy lines for all those years of war. There might have been some whispers of horrific things happening, but nobody was prepared to see the hell on Earth that awaited unsuspecting troops like me. Mr. Corso continued, We were your age when we marched in—and our innocence, or any left at that point, marched out. Nothing could prepare you for what we saw. The guards had abandoned the Death Camp. We looked at living skeletons with a thin layer of skin reaching for us. We opened everything to free everyone and shared food, but beyond that, we didn’t do anything else except call for humanitarian aid. We were on a mission and had to continue our advance. We left, carrying visions of them in haunting thoughts that will never not seem like it just happened today. How could human beings do that to other human beings? I’ll never know the answer. Unfortunately, it was a scene we’d come across again and again. I can still smell it. There are no words that’ll ever capture it.
Eric and I were absolutely mesmerized, hanging on his every word.
“Hey! Hey! Those boys don’t want to hear your tired old stories all night. Get back here. We have pizzas to make!” Mrs. Corso browbeat her husband back to the kitchen, unaware of the story he had shared.
Decades later, I’d visit “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.” At the Cincinnati Museum Center.
Auschwitz was a complex of World War II concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in southern Poland, near Kraków. The Yiddish word for the town was Oświęcim.
The traveling exhibit brings the story of Auschwitz to the broader world to witness its horror. Hundreds of artifacts are used in this telling, on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and other institutions. But the prevailing story of this Death Camp is one of survival! The artifacts presented include prisoner shoes, clothing, children’s dolls, eyeglasses, and the sinister concrete posts that were part of the extermination camp’s fence.
The preservation of this story and its artifacts is to remind future generations everywhere of one of history’s darkest times, in the hope that it is not repeated. It happens gradually, then all at once, with great propaganda, turning a population against what the powers deem the enemy within. Germans didn’t understand the gravity of the situation until it was too late. Would you?
By Frank Rocco Satullo, The OhioTraveler
