COMMENTARY : Film on Blacks’ Liberation of Jews From Nazis Has Enduring Message

A bitter confrontation erupted last week between Jews and African-Americans in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood when a jury acquitted Lemrick Nelson Jr., a 17-year-old black man. He had been accused of murdering a Rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, in 1991.

Sporadic violence erupted as angry Hasidic Jews marched in the streets demanding justice and a new trial. Public officials were concerned that the case could become a New York City version of the Rodney G. King decision that caused rioting in Los Angeles this year.

As the Crown Heights controversy escalated, one black veteran shouted to a group of Jewish protesters: “We rescued you from the concentration camps!” It was a reminder of an often forgotten chapter in black-Jewish relations.

That dramatic encounter is vividly captured in “Liberators,” a PBS documentary that will air on national television Wednesday, Veteran’s Day. In April, 1945, at the end of World War II, the Nazi death camps of Dachau and Buchenwald were liberated by an all-black unit of the Army.

The program focuses on that unit, the men of the 761st Tank Battalion, who had to fight simultaneously on two fronts during the war. The obvious enemy was Hitler’s army in Europe. But the 761st also battled the racist attitudes of their white “comrades” and officers in the U.S. military.

“Liberators” includes the story of Jackie Robinson, an officer of the 761st who went on to become the first black in baseball’s major leagues. Robinson was court-martialed after he protested discriminatory treatment on an Army bus, but was acquitted. Ironically, while training in Louisiana, the American blacks had fewer privileges than German prisoners of war kept at the same post.

“Liberators” graphically describes how the black tank unit broke through the Nazis’ positions, clearing the way for infantry units. Fighting continuously for 183 days, across six European countries, the 761st helped destroy a monstrous racist empire. But the documentary’s highlight is the life-affirming encounter between Jewish inmates of Dachau and Buchenwald and the men of the 761st.

Like most Americans, the black soldiers knew very little about the Nazis’ murderous war against the Jewish people. Although the African-Americans had seen combat in Europe and experienced racism at home, they were unprepared for the piles of unburied Jewish corpses, the smoldering crematories, the Nazi medical labs where grisly medical experiments were performed, and the camp prisoners who resembled the walking dead.

A Buchenwald inmate interviewed on film recalls African-American soldiers “crying like babies” as they picked up the bodies, some dead, some barely alive. A black soldier remembers entering the death camp an angry man, an American resenting a country that treated him “as though I was not good enough.” But that day, he said, he realized that human suffering transcended his own pain. In Buchenwald, he said, he saw “the face of evil,” the horror of racism.

The PBS documentary follows two African-American rescuers who return 45 years later to Buchenwald. Words such as gripping and compelling are inadequate to describe the scene as black veterans, members of America’s largest victimized community, retrace their steps in the company of a Jew, a member of the world’s largest victimized community.

When the lights came on in the screening room, blacks and Jews tearfully embraced one another. They had witnessed a little-known story that needs to be told to a new generation, a story that needs no buzz words, emotive music or contrived images.

“Liberators” is unlikely to bring harmony to Crown Heights. Nor will it overcome the continuing pathology of racism in our society. A few bigots who hate blacks and Jews will sneer, arguing the Holocaust never happened.

But truth is always truth. “Liberators” reminds us that once, nearly 50 years ago, in the belly of the brutal beast of Nazism, some Jewish inmates of the death camps and some African-American soldiers met in a historic encounter. It was an experience that permanently changed their lives. And theirs is a story that may change ours as well.