History of Sorts

Abraham Judah Klausner was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 27, 1915, one of five children of Joseph Klausner, a Hungarian immigrant who owned a dry goods store, and Tillie Binstalk Klausner, an Austrian immigrant. He was raised in Denver, Colorado. He graduated from the University of Denver in 1938 and was ordained at Hebrew Union College in 1941. He joined the US Army as a Chaplain and was there when Dachau was liberated. He was assigned to join the 116th Evacuation Hospital, which had just entered Dachau. He helped to find bedding and food, including kosher provisions, for the 32,000 survivors.

These are just some of his experiences of that time:
“Well, I came into Dachau at night and saw nothing except the main square coming through the big gates.

And of course, I waited for the morning quite anxiously, and when morning came, I walked through the barbed-wire gates into the barracks area and selected one of the barracks. I entered it and there met the first of the survivors. It was a difficult experience for me because I was not confident that I could serve a purpose. I had nothing to offer. I had nothing to give. People needed amenities, needed attention of various kinds, and I had nothing. But nevertheless, there I was in Dachau and I felt I had to do something, and so I entered the barracks and stood there, terribly disturbed. Here we were in a period of liberation and the people were still in barracks, stretched out on shelves. There were three rows of shelves, nothing other than the shelves. There wasn’t a…a piece of linen of any kind. There wasn’t a bar of soap. There wasn’t a chair or a place to sit down. It was just a…a dirty situation. There were people either stretched out on the shelves or moving about listlessly. Paid no attention to me as if I didn’t exist. No one came towards me to say, ‘Welcome,’ or, ‘What is it you want?’ They just, uh…I was just an apparition.”

“The, compulsion, or the drive, was so great that people broke out of camps and walked, traveled–there weren’t any forms of transportation across Czechoslovakia, Poland, into Russia–looking for, uh, for, for fragments of families. And people came out of east Europe into Munich, and we set up a large tracing program. Besides the, the books that were published, we had a center in Munich at the Deutsches Museum first where people came from all over Europe and came asking about their family. Interesting thing was that we put a table out in the lobby, so to speak. People would come and tear the pages out of the book and we would have to feed the table with books and then we would nail the pages down so they would last a little longer. But if a person came and found no name in the, in the book, they would go over to the wall–it was a very large wall–and they’d write a note on the wall saying, for example, “I was here”—addressing it to a parent or to a child–“I’ve been looking for you, and I will be here or going there,” so that there’d be some point at which they might be able to connect. We were very much involved in looking for children in eastern Europe. People who had left their children either with Christian friends or others wanted to find those children and so we had to set up a program for the search of children, which was haphazard but in many cases it was very effective.”

Sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/en/a-z/oral-history

https://www.accidentaltalmudist.org/heroes/2019/04/17/the-survivors-rabbi/