Veteran’s Judaism made him a POW target in Nazi Germany

The following are excerpts of an article by Jennifer Kavanaugh from the Metro Daily West News*

Life sometimes forces choices that are too awful to be considered real choices, and William Feinberg weighed his fate as a 19-year-old Army soldier in a World War II prison camp.

“It was dangerous, no matter which way you go,” Feinberg said. “If I said I was Jewish, the Germans were going to treat me badly. If I threw away my dog tags, possibly I could have been executed for being a spy. So I finally decided to step forward and admit my religion.”

Feinberg’s choice led to a three-month ordeal of starvation, slave labor and exposure to the German winter, as well as painful memories and a horrible front-row view of inhumanity. But it also may very well have saved his life.

Feinberg served in the 423rd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division, and he and thousands of his fellow soldiers became surrounded and captured by Germans a few days into the Battle of the Bulge.

The Germans marched the prisoners for days, refusing to give them gloves. Feinberg remembers going that entire winter without gloves.

“They wouldn’t let us put our hands in our pockets,” Feinberg said. “They were sadistic.”

Feinberg said the Germans packed the prisoners into freight cars, where they rode for days without bathroom facilities, and were fed cabbage soup and roughly sliced pieces of bread. They arrived in the German prison camp Bad Orb on Christmas Day 1944.

After Feinberg revealed his Jewish ancestry, his captors sent him to Berga Am Elster, an offshoot of one of the death camps. There, he and about 350 other people were forced into manual labor, digging tunnels into the side of a mountain for a munitions factory.

In April 1945, as the Germans forced the prisoners to march to avoid the advancing American troops, Feinberg and two of his friends decided to escape. They crawled through the underbrush, and Feinberg said he crawled ahead to scout the area when an elderly guard caught his friends. Feinberg returned, with a rutabaga in hand.

“I sneaked up behind the guard,” he said. “It’s hard for me to believe it, but I hit him over the head and knocked him down.”

The trio crawled along the ground until they came upon a farmhouse. They hid in the barn, until discovered by the family. As the soldiers tried out their German, the family members offered their help. Feinberg can still remember his first meal at the farmhouse, the first real one they had had in months.

“I get choked up thinking about it,” Feinberg said. “Potato pancakes. They tasted good.”

The family hosted the soldiers for about three days, lying to protect them when German soldiers showed up at the door, as Feinberg and his companions hid under hay. A few days later, they heard the Americans were coming, and they ran to meet them.

For the full story of William Feinberg, I encourage you to read the original story in its entirety from the Metro Daily West News.

*reprinted with permission from the author