Back from the Grave

After the first sickening blows of horror brought by the news of the German concentration camps came the question: how succor the human remnants left alive? From Buchenwald last week TIME Correspondent Percy Knauth reported how U.S. Army doctors have tackled the job.

To the 120th U.S. Army Evacuation Hospital, commanded by Colonel William E. Williams of Austin, Tex., has fallen the terrible task of trying to save the lives of the Buchenwald sick and starving. The hospital moved into Buchenwald April 16 and since then has been working at top speed, helped by French, German, Czech, Hungarian and other doctors among the inmates.

There were 2,180 sick in the camp hospital alone when the hospital unit arrived. The first evening they got 161 more, from the barracks and the so-called "Small Camp"--the worst section of Buchenwald, where the dying were sent when they were considered beyond human care. Most of these patients were suffering from diarrhea, caused simply by lack of food. In the Small Camp men were still dying by the hundreds.

The 120th took over two of the former SS barracks, cleaned them out with the help of internees. They put in cots, blankets and medical supplies of their own issue. A typhus ward was organized in a building formerly used by SS doctors for typhus experiments on the prisoners. Then the Army and inmate doctors readied the 15 other 55 buildings in the camp and started to clean out the terrible barracks of the Small Camp, in which the starving men lay packed like rotting cargo on bare wooden shelves reaching from the floor to the ceiling.

I saw those barracks a few days ago and it was all I could do to stand the sight and smell of the parodies of human beings who inhabited them. They were alive by instinct only and by instinct they almost knocked me down when I produced from my pocket one pitiful chocolate bar in answer to a plea of a prisoner for food. At the sight of that morsel of food these filthy, spidery human beings were galvanized by a single impulse: to get a crumb, just a crumb of something to put into their stomachs. I saw the barracks again today--empty, washed and with a clean wind blowing through them, but still permeated by that awful smell of death. I saw skeletons of men, walking and creeping in a dazed way up & down the halls, unable yet to understand that they were really being fed and nursed back to life.

Everything that medical skill could give them they received. They were first washed in sitdown bathtubs and then, clean and in fresh clothes, they were put to bed in sunlit rooms with flowers. Whole blood was transfused into the emaciated bodies, nourishment was injected intravenously when they could not digest strengthening soups. But more than anything else, the simple fact of humane care and decent surroundings had its effect. In the first two days after the 120th moved in, only two men died.

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