A Liberating ‘Experience’

Leonard “Smitty” Smith and Benjamin Bender are the most unlikely of best friends.

Smith, who is 67 and black, is a former transit policeman. Benjamin Bender, who is a Polish Jew and is 64, immigrated here 30 years ago.

Their lives changed when the Florida retirees met last year while making “Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II.” The award-winning documentary airs Wednesday on PBS’ “American Experience.”

Directed by William Miles and Nina Rosenblum, “Liberators” is about the African-American troops (the 761st tank battalion and the 183rd Combat Engineer Corps), who fought on the European front and also had to combat prejudice within their own segregated Army.

“Liberators” tells the little-known story of how these troops, which included Smith, liberated Bender and 53,000 others from the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.

“(The documentary) profoundly changed their lives,” Rosenblum said. “Ben Bender is (now) the spokesperson for bridging the gap for black and white unity on a level which never would have happened.”

“There is a communication line that they have going that is unbelievable,” Miles said. “Ben and Smitty are like twins.”

“Did you ever see that picture ‘The Battle of the Bulge’?” Smith asked during a recent interview. “That tank outfit (in the movie) was my outfit. In the movie it was all-white. There was not one black soldier in the whole movie.”

Eleanor Roosvelt, Smith said, “felt blacks could do just as good as the white soldiers and that is why they started our outfit. Patton sent for us. I remember the day he came to visit because it was my birthday. He stood on a half-track and said he has nothing but the best. He said, ‘I have a little hill I want you to take.’

“This hill we had to take--the whole Third Armored Division couldn’t take it--but we took it with a battalion. We lost quite a few men. We stayed on the front for 183 days without any relief and a tank battalion is only supposed to last 12 days.”

Smith vividly recalled liberating Dachau in April, 1945. “I got angry,” he said. After knocking down the gate, “all of these human skeletons, falling out of the doors, came out. We said, ‘Oh my God, what is this?’ It made us so angry. I couldn’t understand how another human could treat other humans like that.”

Bender had spent a few years in Buchenwald when the camp was liberated on April 11, 1945. After decades of being unable to talk about the war, he felt compelled to write a letter to The New York Times in 1985 after reading a story about a Times reporter who went back to Buchenwald to celebrate the liberation of the camp by the Russians.

“After reading this article, I was flabbergasted because the whole thing was an injustice and a total lie,” Bender said, glancing over at Smith sitting next to him. “I wrote a letter to The New York Times describing the day of April 11, 1945.”

That day, Bender recalled, he stood 50 yards from the gate. “I never saw in my life, except in film, black soldiers,” he said. “I saw the soldiers coming in waves. They crossed the gate and crossed themselves. What they saw on the ground was hundreds of inmates--some dying, some dead, some clinging to death and some in the last gasp.”

Bender was left speechless. “I would have liked to say a word of appreciation and gratitude, but I couldn’t,” he said. “For the first time after five years, I saw humanity at work. Buchenwald was a very inhuman place.”

During his stay at Buchenwald, Bender never cried. Even when he discovered his older brother had been killed there the day before the liberation. Bender’s parents had committed suicide in 1943 because, he said, they wanted to die in dignity.

“You weren’t allowed to cry in Buchenwald because tears were a symbol of weakness,” he said. “If you are weak, you have to die.”

Bender and Smith finally met in Germany during a sequence shot at Buchenwald.

“We were in the crematorium in the place where they burned the bodies,” Bender said, glancing over at Smith. “We stood in the gas chamber next to the oven and this man, who I didn’t know before, suddenly embraced me and cried. I rested my head on his shoulder. For the first time, I cried in Buchenwald. For the first time in my life, I got a warm embrace from a soldier who was a liberator. I could say on the ashes of the past that a beautiful friendship was born.”

Smith and Bender’s eyes welled up with tears. “This is a friend,” Bender said softly, as he smiled through his tears at Smith.

“The American Experience: Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II” airs Wednesday at 7 p.m. on KVCR; 9 p.m. KCET and KPBS.

A book of the same name about the documentary, written by Miles, Rosenblum and Lou Potter, was recently published by Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich ($29.95).