Reruns: At my movie club discussion last night of "Night Train to Munich," I told the group about my dad, who was one of the liberators of Ahlem-- a concentration camp near Hanover--in 1945....
Then I decided to put two old posts about Ahlem from my old blog up today, the second of which is my dad's obituary that I wrote in 2016, a few months after he died.
Survivors at Ahlem, with a US soldier/liberator behind them…. (Never Forget!)
April, 1945: Ahlem concentration camp outside Hanover, Germany was liberated--and among the liberators were Vernon Tott, Henry Kissinger and my dad
By Bonnie McGrath, April 30, 2021 at 4:31 pm
On April 10, 1945, Ahlem, a concentration camp near Hanover, Germany was liberated by the US 84th Infantry Division–nicknamed “The Railsplitters” because its roots went back to Abraham Lincoln.
The 84th entered France in 1944, following in the bootprints of the Normandy Invasion and fought the Battle of the Bulge. They soldiered on into Germany where they met the Russians and won the wa
My dad was one of the soldiers who liberated Ahlem and earned the Bronze Star; former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was another one. But there was one other soldier who was there that I’ve gotten to know in the last few days from Sioux City, Iowa: Vernon Tott.
His role was such that a 2007 documentary came out about him: “Angel of Ahlem.”
When the 84th arrived, Tott pulled out a pocket camera and took a lot of pictures of the prisoners. He was shocked and horrified and sickened by what he saw. But he was a hero.
My dad, Lew Taman, also a hero, said they sent him in first. He thought because he was Jewish. But the fact that he was a medic makes more sense to me. He and his fellow soldiers had never seen people in such bad shape, and had never experienced the cruelty and barbarism that one group of people could do to another. They had never seen anything like it–the starvation and emaciation and the despair that the nazis were capable of inflicting and were totally responsible for.
My dad always said the prisoners didn’t want any food or drink when he went in. Even though they were just skin and bones. And so weak, some couldn’t even stand up.
All they wanted was cigarettes. Just cigarettes, which my dad gave them. All they wanted. His fellow soldiers were sickened, humbled and compassionate–and, as one can imagine, never the same. The horror stuck.
At some point during Vernon Tott’s humble later life working in Sioux City at a local Swift meatpacking facility and raising a big family, he decided to make use of his pictures. He made it his mission to find as many of the prisoners that he photographed as he could–while battling, and eventually succumbing to stomach cancer in 2005. He made it his mission to meet them again, pay his respects and give them pictures of themselves from that horrid episode in their lives.
During his search, some of the prisoners were unable to identify themselves. Because they looked so different; and because some had even repressed their memories.
The documentary follows a series of “reunions.” Tott did his research through holocaust organizations that were keeping track of those abused so awfully by the nazis, and had gathered a lot their contact information.
Tott was able to not only visit the remnants of Ahlem (including bones and teeth beneath the ground), he was also able to get the pictures to several of those still alive, and he even met some of those living overseas. A group even came to the US to honor Tott with a sterling silver Kiddush cup before he died.
As for me, I found out about the video very recently, sent for it, received it and watched it, all in a matter of days. And now I know what my late dad was talking about, thanks to Vernon Tott. I am another person grateful for his picture-taking, his determination and his diligence. Now I have seen actual pictures of exactly what my dad saw when he liberated Ahlem, and of what he tried to describe over the years.
It was horrific. But I also know that my dad–one of their liberators–when he gave the prisoners the cigarettes they so desired, also gave them sympathy and support and food and water and friendship. And he probably kidded them and laughed with them and told them a few jokes to lighten their load.
I know he made them feel human again; he made them find humor and fun and hope for the future again. And thanks to Tott, we know at least some were able to go on and live as full-fledged human beings who had overcome the worst.
I know what my dad always did for me and other people: he made us feel safe, and through his humor I always saw the absurd and truly funny side of everything in life. Until he died on my 65th birthday in 2015, waiting until I was ensconced as a full-fledged senior citizen.
I don’t think that was any coincidence. My senior years were officially beginning, just as death at the age of 92 ended his.
The first Memorial Day I ever had without the best soldier in the world: My Dad
By Bonnie McGrath, May 31, 2016 at 2:54 am
Memorial Day ceremony today at 9th and Michigan Photo/Chicago Tribune
I've been to the big Memorial Day event in the neighborhood at the General Logan statue at 9th and Michigan a few times over the years. They set up chairs and put out flags and lay down wreaths and the whole ceremony is rife with dignitaries. But at this year's ceremony I had a lump in my throat during the whole hour because I thought about my dad, who was a soldier's soldier.
And who always called it "Decoration Day."
He passed away last year on my birthday during his 93rd year. He didn't want a funeral or an obituary or anything like that--too corny--but two soldiers came, a young man and woman, and played taps. They folded up a flag for us, just before we put him in his crypt forever. And that was that. That he would have liked.
He was the greatest soldier of the greatest generation that fought WW2--The Big One. He loved the army. He loved army food and his fellow soldiers and the cities in France and Belgium that he fought through during the Battle of the Bulge--after he entered Europe on the heels of Normandy on his way to Germany to meet the Russians.
He liberated a concentration camp called Ahlem, near Hanover. They sent him in first. "It was amazing to me," he always said, "the people were totally emaciated, starving, dying…and all they wanted from me was one thing: cigarettes." Which he gave them.
He enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, trained in Louisiana, and the Army sent him to the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia to study engineering, before they sent him across the sea to fight the Nazis. He loved that.
He grew up on Loomis Street in Englewood. (Yes, that Englewood. He went to Lindblom High School.) He spent all his time at Sherman Park. Through the years, I'd ask him if he ever went to this place or that place around Chicago when he was little. "I never wanted to leave the neighborhood," he said. "Because if something happened, I didn't want to miss it." Yet, he knew every street in Chicago and he knew how to get everyplace and he knew the history of everything in town.
Sometime in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan gave him the Bronze Star at a dinner in Chicago. One of his compatriots in the war was Henry Kissinger, of all people. Same infantry, same regiment. My dad went up to him--he had a few drinks and figured, oh why not? "I don't know if you remember me," he started out. Kissinger smiled and interrupted him, "Of course I do! You're Lew, that skinny medic. I'll never forget you."
My dad always said even though the Nazis weren't supposed to shoot at medics, they did anyway. He dodged bullets, lived in foxholes and learned a lot about how the human body works. He said his feet got so cold, he thought he'd lose them. He passed out Purple Hearts to those he treated. It cheered up those who were wounded.
He saw it all.
He didn't go on to become a doctor--or an engineer--but rather a great businessman, investor, developer. Very kind and considerate and conservative. Never greedy or impulsive. He was on important boards--but he also took time to go out on Michigan Avenue and bring apples to the horses drawing the carriages. Once he was at a restaurant at Water Tower Place and sitting in a wheelchair at the next table was a girl with cerebral palsy, who was wearing a Bulls T-shirt.
"Do you like Michael Jordan?" he asked her. She did. He left the restaurant briefly and came back with an autographed picture of Michael Jordan that he happened to have at home--and he told her it was hers. She beamed. He was very happy.
My dad was easy-going and a great sport who was always ready to share a wild ride. (Literally. We'd go to Riverview when I was a kid and go on every ride together. And he did teach me how to drive, not to mention ride a bike! And steer a boat. And cook--with my little Betty Crocker stove for little girls.)
He went, just for the fun of it, to shady meetings with our neighbor who he wanted to keep company, a lawyer who represented Fidel Castro's interests in the United States. In fact, Castro's son came and stayed with him for a time--right next door to us--to keep him away from danger.
He had courage. True courage.
When we were at the Worlds' Fair in New York in 1964, he found a spider in his Dutch stew at the restaurant in the Indonesian Pavilion. "Oh, that's a 'Cook' spider," he said, totally unfazed; he took it out and carefully put it on the table.
When he took me for an overnight ride on the Milwaukee clipper across Lake Michigan from Milwaukee to Muskegon, Michigan when I was eight-years-old, we got a stateroom with bunkbeds. My dad was so tall, he had to sleep with his feet on the toilet at the foot of the lower bunk. But he didn't care. When we disembarked, it was the first time I experienced true sadness in my life, true grief, depression. I wanted to stay on that ship forever.
A few years later we went to Washington, DC and we sat and watched the filibustering of the Civil Rights Act. We also visited Illinois Senator Paul Douglas' senate office during that trip and my mother was mad because my dad ate too many of the cookies that were offered to us while we chatted with our senator. "That's what they're there for," he told her. "For his guests to eat."
When I was bored and wanted time to pass, or wished for some unpleasant experience to be over, he'd always say, "Never wish time away." And as the years went on, I tried to appreciate in some way--or at least learn something from living in the moments that I wished would pass.
We lived in Uptown. (After we moved from Hyde Park when I was a toddler.) He had true-blue friends--and relatives--from every walk of life who he enjoyed immensely. He'd do anything for them. And he was absolutely hilarious. It was impossible to spend time with him without getting sick from laughing. He totally appreciated the deep human humor of comic geniuses like Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners. And he passed that on.
He would have gotten quite a kick out of Donald Trump running for president, let alone winning. I can only imagine the jokes he would have made.... He would have found it interesting, though, because he knew Trump's father's best friend and used to hear gossip about Trump decades ago when he was just getting started.
He was a great adventure traveler (oh, the crazy vacations we took and the crazy people we met) and a man of a million hobbies--from raising pigeons when he was a teenager to herding cattle as an adult, to art collecting (he knew--and collected--Leroy Neiman from the start) , oil painting (he made some wonderful copies of Piet Mondrians for me), magic classes and "camping" in the first RV of its sort made by General Motors.
He even took baseball lessons with Babe Ruth when he was a kid--and as a young man, he owned a small share of the Cubs and went to stockholders meetings in PK Wrigley's office. We all got a kick out of everyone at Wrigley Field mistaking my dad for catcher Joe Girardi's father--and all the perks that came with it, like free parking in the players' lot!
All we had to do was say the word "Girardi" and that was code to break out in laughter, wherever we were. In fact, there were a lot of words that were associated with baseball and cracking up. Like the time on a trip to Arizona when we visited a Wrigley Field groundskeeper's sister who lived there. We had such a good time laughing with her, that we kept it going until the day my dad passed away--with the code words, "Dean's sister."
We decided to keep his distinctive and sought after season ticket to Wrigley Field and I just sat in his seat a few weeks ago, seeing the game from behind the screen--all the while being on TV with all the batters.
My dad always believed in trying. For whatever reason. When he realized in the 1970s that Illinois Bell Telephone had no women on its board, he told me to try to get on. He thought I'd have an "in" because at the time I was the only woman Illinois Bell installer in the State. I didn't get chosen. But lawyer Esther Rothstein did. And my dad thought it was because I planted the seed.
My dad knew how everything worked. Once when we were coming back from a summer in Scandinavia, the PanAm jet we were on, about to land in New York, suddenly seemed to be crashing. But my dad knew exactly what was happening--and the plane suddenly took off again without ever hitting the ground. "Something got in his way," he explained, "that's all it is. And he got us out of trouble."
That's how my dad saw life. People getting other people out of trouble. If you were in jail, he'd bail you out. If you needed cash, he'd give you some. If you needed a friend, he'd gladly be one. Whoever he said he felt sorry for, he tried to help. And he felt sorry for a lot of poor souls for a lot of reasons. He used to say to me and my brother, "If anything happens to me...." We knew what he meant: how would we make it without his helping hand and moral support?
But sometimes, something did outsmart him. Like a bird that kept chirping in our Las Vegas hotel room. That confounded him for days; where is that bird? we wondered. Until we found out it was our phone ringing. (And by the way, that style of phone was so pretty--like a bird, perhaps?--that it wound up in the Museum of Modern Art.)
Because of the Army, and being a medic, he knew everything about health, too. And nutrition. (He was a wheat germ buff--and in the 60s, when I discovered granola, he was very impressed.) Whenever I had a symptom, I called him first. One morning I called because I had the worst and weirdest sore throat I'd ever had. What do you think, dad? I asked him, after describing what it felt like. I was very scared.
"Well, let's see. Did you eat any pineapple last night?" he said.
Yes, I had. A LOT of fresh pineapple. I had been to a party with a Hawaiian beach theme. "Well, that's what it is," he said, explaining the presence of an irritating enzyme in pineapple. There was nothing I ever asked him about health that he wasn't right about. Mental or physical. He knew all the nuance and made all the connections. He was the first person I ever knew who could identify a panic attack. He had purchased a book about them and read it through. Very much ahead of his time.
But he hated the Red Cross. My grandfather died at the age of 49 while my dad was fighting the Nazis. The Red Cross assured my aunt and my grandmother that they'd get to him on the battlefield and tell him. They didn't. My dad figured out his father died when he got letters from home from his mother and sister referring to the aftermath of his dad's death, assuming that he already knew. As generous as he was when it came to charity, he never gave a dime to the Red Cross.
Nor would he ever buy a German car.
But he lived happily with a gun, an arm band and other things he'd taken from a Nazi--for the rest of his long and eventful and very interesting life. Those were the symbols that he'd fought against. And won against. And like every soldier they talked about at today's ceremony who fought and lived or fought and died, he was proud and everyone was proud of him.
It was a good war he fought. Once, during the Bush years when I was on one of my tirades about the Iraq war and the soldiers we were losing there, all for nothing, I said, "Dad, don't you think we should just pull out? Just leave as fast as when we got there? Give up and go?"
"Nah, we can't do that," he said. "They'll think we're crazy."
He gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. He was my "cute little daddy." That was what I called him when I was a cute little toddler. Even though he was "6-foot, 4-and-a-half."
And every single day of his life, he lived up to every single inch.
Tags: Lewis Taman