Witnesses to War Trials : Friends Were Court Reporters at Dachau Hearings on Nazi Atrocities

Two women. Both grew up poor--one in New York, the other in California. One has an eye for art; the other makes art. One is a lifelong student of learning, and the other is a world traveler.

They met in Washington during the ‘40s, working at stenography jobs that opened up when many men in the labor force went off to war. Four years later, they were in Germany together, working for the U.S. Army.

Today, Sylvia Gavurin of West Los Angeles and Sylvia Mathon of Encino are still friends--bound by the history they each recorded at the Dachau War Crimes Trials.

Sylvia Mathon remembers a few words quite clearly. “The first time I heard the trial judge say, ‘You shall be hung by your neck until dead,’ I was so startled that I didn’t write the words down,” she recalled. “I had never heard a human being say this to another human being before, except in the movies. After that it became a job, and some of the other reporters and I were taking bets on how many times the judge was going to say that.”

Gavurin, by contrast, found it progressively more painful as time went on to live with the descriptions and reminders of Nazi atrocities day after day.

“My emotions were killing me. I was concentrating on the words, which I had to carefully transcribe. . . . To this day, I cannot recall any of the things that were said, only that I suffered a great deal and had to go into therapy when I returned, a year later.”

The most notorious Nazi war criminals, including Hermann Goering, the Hitler crony who directed Germany’s Air Force, were tried at the international tribunal at Nuremberg. Dachau, near Munich, was one of several sites for similar trials convened by individual Allied powers when Germany was partitioned after the war. Dachau was in the American sector, so the trials there were administered by the U.S. Army.

Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher for the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles, said the Dachau trials resulted in death sentences for 260 German war criminals (although some were later commuted) and prison sentences for 498 more.

When they first teamed up in Washington in the early days of the war, however, the two Sylvias had no inkling of what was happening in German concentration camps. They landed jobs as court reporters for the Office of Price Administration, the wartime bureaucracy that regulated prices for products that were subject to rationing. The reporters had the job of taking word-for-word records as representatives of various industries met with the administration to hammer out prices for their products.

Gavurin and Mathon got their assignment to go to Germany soon after the war ended, but they offer differing accounts of how it came about. Mathon recalls that she persuaded Gavurin to go with her; Gavurin remembers being asked to go by a War Production Board official. Their initial destination was to be Nuremberg, where they would serve as reporters for the international tribunal; at the last minute, they were reassigned to Dachau.

“When I heard about the Nuremberg assignment, I was afraid to go, because I had heard stories about WACS having to wash their hair in helmets,” Mathon recalled. “I talked Sylvia Gavurin into going--that’s how I remember it. . . . We didn’t know about the Holocaust. We had no idea. The fact that we were both Jewish had nothing to do with it. No one asked, and we didn’t tell. I wanted to have a good time. I was 24. It was my first plane trip. It started my love for travel.”

The trials were held in the Dachau concentration camp. Gavurin remembers walking past glass cases that held some of the evidence of the atrocities, such as lampshades made from human skin, that she had heard described in testimony.

Dachau, according to Breitbart, was the first of the 1,634 concentration camps built by the German government. It was originally set up not for Jews, but for political dissidents and as a training center for concentration camp guards. As the war progressed, however, it evolved into a death camp similar to such places as Auschwitz and Treblinka, though on a smaller scale. Breitbart estimated that 50,000 people, most of them Jews, were put to death there.

The German prisoners were held in the same buildings that had housed prisoners during the war.

The most famous case tried at Dachau was that of SS Maj. Gen. Jurgen Stroop and 22 others who were held responsible for the final annihilation of the Jewish residents of the Warsaw Ghetto. Thirteen, including Stroop, were sentenced to death. Stroop, however, was extradited to Poland, tried again, and hanged there in September, 1951.

Mathon also vividly remembers what she calls the Malmedy case. Malmedy was the Belgian town where 100 American soldiers, captured in the Battle of the Bulge in December, 1944, were herded onto a field and fired upon by German troops. “After they surrendered, they were massacred by the SS,” Mathon said. “By the time I transcribed this case I had no trouble with my feelings. I hated those bastards, and it didn’t matter what happened to them as far as I was concerned.”

But it wasn’t all work. For all the horrors exposed during the trials, the assignment was also something of an adventure for the two young women.

“It was exciting times,” Mathon said. “For a poor girl from Brooklyn, living in lavish surroundings, being treated so well by the authorities, there was fun too. We traveled, and I went antiquing whenever I could. I also went looking for relatives who were in the concentration camps. I found two distant cousins and helped them to leave the country.”

Gavurin, in her free time, helped many of the Dachau survivors who remained at the camp find their relatives. She also helped run a mail service for them.

Sylvia Mathon was born in he South and raised in Brooklyn by her grandmother, because her mother felt she wouldn’t get an education if she stayed in Georgia. Mathon graduated from Hunter College with a teacher’s credential, but could not get a job. She bought a steno machine in 1940 and a book on how to use it.

“I got a bookkeeping job for $12 a week,” she said. “I had never seen the inside of a ledger. I kept improving my speed with the steno, took a Civil Service test, passed it, and got a job in Washington for $25 a week.”

Sylvia Gavurin grew up poor in Boyle Heights, the daughter of Polish immigrants. Her father was a baker because, Gavurin said, he couldn’t earn a living as an intellectual. Her mother died when she was 13.

“I was a mother to my younger sisters from the time I was 7,” she said. “When you were poor, you didn’t go to the doctor until you were dying. Because my mother knew she was going to die, she taught me things about life which I probably wouldn’t have known about at such an early age.”

At 21, when many women of her generation were getting married and having children, Gavurin hitchhiked with a friend from California to New York.

“It was the Depression. People were kind, and they helped each other,” she said. “We had rules like, don’t take a ride with more than one man in the car, or accept a ride that wasn’t going at least 100 miles.” From New York she went to Washington, all the while going to night school, taking classes and improving her skills.

Gavurin returned to the United States before Mathon. “I thought many times after I returned home about how one country like Germany could have been capable of doing what it did,” she said. “I also thought about how, at the end of war, people sat down and communicated and carved up nations and I asked myself, why couldn’t they do that before the killing--before the war?

“Life was never the same for me, but I do live with a sense of blessing. I married a wonderful man (Sol Gavurin), started to paint, and went to Santa Monica College,” she said.

Gavurin earned her associate of arts degree at age 73 and was the oldest graduate in the college’s history. Today, eight years later, her artwork hangs in a show titled, “I Remember When.” It’s a presentation of the Senior Artists Workshop, featuring more than 25 artists, at the Claude Pepper Senior Center. Gavurin’s painting in the show is titled “Garden of No Tomorrow--Dachau.”

Mathon never went back to Brooklyn. After leaving Dachau, she collected her lump-sum paycheck and set out for California to visit her friend, Sylvia Gavurin. She fell in love with the man who came to the airport by chance to pick her up, Benjamin Mathon; he was the only one with a car.

They married. Today, Mathon is retired after 40 years of court reporting. She’s a member of UCLA’s Plato Society, a group of people over 60 who engage in academic research and investigations. She has traveled all over the world.

Recently, she went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. “There’s a glass wall there showing all of the villages that were destroyed by the Nazis,” she said. “I looked at it, and there I was, face to face with the name of my mother’s hometown, and I knew that the rest of my family never survived. Up until that moment, I never really believed it.”