WWII Veteran Remembers War, Discovers Truth

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MICHEL MARTIN, host:

This is Tell Me More from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin. In a moment, we hear from a top chef about bringing the flavor to holiday meals without breaking the bank. G. Garvin is in the house.

But first, this Thanksgiving, we brought you a special story of gratitude. We spoke with Leon Bass, a World War II veteran who was just a teenager when he first began serving in the U.S. Army. In Europe, he witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the Nazis, and that was an experience that helped set the course of his life. Bass went on to become an educator, someone who's tried to heal divisions between peoples of various backgrounds. It's a story we thought would be especially relevant to hear again during this holiday season. Mr. Bass began our conversation by explaining how he came to enlist in the Army.

Mr. LEON BASS: I was just a young man of 18, and I had just come out of high school and I didn't know what I was going to do, and the job I had was not to my liking. So I said, I'd better join the Army. So I did what so many young men were doing. I volunteered.

MARTIN: What was it like being an African-American in the army at that time?

Mr. BASS: Well, I didn't realize that the decision I made was going to bring me face to face with institutional racism. And that happened on the day that I went down to the induction center in Philadelphia. I went down with some of my friends who happened to be white. And when we got to the door of that institution, there was a sergeant standing there. He took one look at me and he said, go this way. And he looked at my friends and he pointed the other way. That was done because in 1943 all of the Armed Forces, the entire military was segregated.

So my country practiced and promoted institutional racism, and by doing that, my country was telling me I wasn't good enough. I wasn't good enough to serve my country with white soldiers.

Well, I was one of 600 African-Americans. We were all sent down into the Deep South for training. We went down to places like Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas. And in all of these places, every one of them, the people who lived there, the people that I'm going to protect and defend with my life should that come necessary. And they let me know every day, in so many different ways, that they thought I wasn't good enough.

I wasn't good enough in Macon, Georgia to get a drink of water at a public water fountain. And in Beaumont, Texas they still said I wasn't good enough to eat a meal in a restaurant. And in Mississippi, I stood up for more than a hundred miles looking at empty seats on a bus that I was not permitted to occupy because they said I wasn't good enough. What a damnable experience to have when you're 18 years of age and you volunteered to serve your country.

MARTIN: What was it like, though, when you - to contrast those experiences to what you were fighting for? I mean, you were fighting to defend freedom and to defeat oppression.

Mr. BASS: Yeah. That began to come to me slowly. I was just 19. I didn't have all the answers, but I really was an angry young soldier because I was angry at my country because I felt my country was using me, abusing me, putting me out in harms way to fight and maybe die to preserve all those wonderful things that every American should enjoy. And yet my country was saying to me, Leon, you're not good enough to enjoy what you're fighting for. And that's what made me an angry, young black soldier.

Then yes, we went into Germany, crossed the Rhine River, went up to a place called Gutenberg. And then we was told to go up into East Germany, to go to a place called Weimar. And it was there that we were supposed to set up our camp. We began to do that, but right away, the lieutenant, who was in the intelligence reconnaissance section for the battalion, and I was in that section, well he came over to me and two others, he said, come with me. We followed him. We got aboard the truck and I said to him, sir, tell me, where are we going? And he responded by saying, we're going to a concentration camp. And that was news to me. I didn't know anything about concentration camps. In all the training they had given me, no one ever mentioned concentration camp.

But on this day in April, in 1945, I was going to have the shock of my life because I was going to walk through the gates of a concentration camp called Buchenwald. And you got to believe me when I tell you, I was not ready for that. I was totally unprepared for that kind of a situation.

But you see, I can never, ever forget the day. It was a spring day in April when I walked through those gates and I saw in front me what I call the walking dead. I saw human beings, human beings that had been beaten and starved and tortured and denied everything, everything that would make life livable. There they stood in front of me. They were skin and bone. They had skeletal faces with deep-set eyes. Their heads had been clean-shaved and there they stood in these ragged, striped-type pajamas. Some were naked. I could see sores on their bodies, and I was told that came from malnutrition. One man held out his hands. His fingers had webbed together with the scabs that come from the sores brought on by the malnutrition.

I saw so much there. I saw where they lived in barracks. I went inside but I could go no further. The odor, the stench that comes from death and human waste was overpowering, and so I stood there holding my breath. Now, I knew I had to leave so I turned, but before I could step away I looked down, and there on a bottom bunk was a man, an emaciated, skin-and-bone human being, on a bed of filthy straw and rags. He was trying to look up at me with that skeletal face and those deep-set eyes. But he was so weak. He had been starved for so long. It was a struggle for him to look up at me, but finally he did. He looked up at me. He said nothing, nor did I.

MARTIN: What effect do you think this had on you throughout your life? And our subject today being gratitude.

Mr. BASS: Gratitude.

MARTIN: What do you think you learned as a result of seeing these things?

Mr. BASS: After I had seen all of this, the torture chambers, I saw the place where they did so many other inhuman things to people, I - I could no longer stay there. I felt I had seen enough, but I realized that I was not the same anymore. Something had happened to me. I realized now that human suffering is not relegated to just me. Oh, no, the pain and suffering that I saw, both in the United States and in Nazi Germany, oh, yeah, that pain and suffering touches all of us, the good and the bad. We all become damaged by the evil of racism and anti-Semitism, bigotry, prejudice, and that's what I saw, and that's what affected me. And for the first time now I realized that I had something to fight for.

I had to be aware how blessed I was to live in a country where the opportunity to change is possible. And so I waited for my friends to come. We got back aboard the truck. We left that place in silence.

MARTIN: If you're just joining us, you're listening to Tell Me More from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin. I'm speaking with educator Leon Bass. He's a public speaker, a former educator and a former member of the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion, which provided support after the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

We've been talking about gratitude, and sometimes people say, how is it possible to give thanks, to be grateful in the midst of evil, in the midst of suffering? How is it possible?

Mr. BASS: It's possible. But I must let you know that whatever I have been able to become, in spite of all that was ugly that happened to me, I owe it to my two parents who were wonderful. I owe it to those teachers at that black elementary school who touched my life and told me that I was worthy, I was something of value, that I could do and be if I just want to work at it. Those were blessings that I recall.

When you realize that you've been blessed, then you engage in the struggle, and you're strongly engaged in it because you want to do something for someone else in spite of the system that might have been telling you all along that you weren't good enough. And so I'm grateful for my parents.

MARTIN: What are the things that you've done with your life since that time as you've worked to bridge gaps of understanding between groups? And I just wanted to talk to you about that. I mean, as a person who's seen so much in your own life, how is that possible, particularly when people have not seen those things?

For example, there was this very much publicized incident in 1994 when a group of black and Latino students from Oakland were watching "Schindler's List" and were actually observed laughing, and you were called in and asked to speak to those students. Could you talk about that? I mean, how do you build empathy with people who, like you, feel, you know, they haven't perhaps gotten their fair share of things and perhaps have not seen the things that you've seen?

Mr. BASS: Well, I came home from the service hoping that things were going to be better. And I went to college, and it was right in this north, in Pennsylvania, and I registered but then I found out I couldn't live in the dormitory because I wasn't good enough. I was black. And that added to my turmoil. I couldn't go to a movie without having to sit in the balcony, which I refused to do and I sat on the main floor. I was confronting all of these evils but I didn't become evil.

I can only attribute it to what my parents did for me long before the Dr. King came on the scene. But when I was teaching in school and trying to get youngsters to learn not to fight to solve their problems, his clarion voice came out of the Deep South and told me I could make a difference. I didn't have to be ugly to try to change things. And so I listened to the man at the same time Malcolm X was speaking. He was talking about, hey, don't bother anybody, but if they put their hands on you, send them to the cemetery.

Now I had these two forces impacting on my life. I had to decide which way I was going to go, but I'm very grateful this Thanksgiving Day that I went the way of Dr. Martin Luther King. I went to Washington, D.C. when he said, I have a dream. I never forget that day. I stood there crying because he made me know that the struggle was worthwhile, and I knew - I knew that I had to try to do whatever I could do. And so my forte was teaching, and so I continue to teach young people.

And I didn't connect all that I had experienced in my life until much later, maybe 25 years before I dealt with the issue of Buchenwald. I was made principal of a high school in Philadelphia, an all-black high school, all male. Dr. King had just died, and I was assigned to that school, and I had to try to make order come out of the chaos. I tried to get these angry young men to understand that we could do things together, we can bring about change without being so angry that we become violent. And I was struggling, how can I do this here? And I passed a classroom and I heard the noise, I looked in - there were some of these angry young men, their feet on the furniture, their hats on, they were smoking cigarettes, but they were being rude to the person that was trying to talk to them, so I stepped into the room and I looked.

And there was this lady. She wasn't the teacher. She was a visitor. She was a survivor. She has survived one of the worst concentration camps in Europe and she came out of a place called Auschwitz. And she lost all of her family, everyone - grandmother, grandfather, mother, father. So when it was all over, only she came out alive. Her name is Nina Kaleska(ph). She still lives in Philadelphia somewhere today. She was the only one to come out alive.

She turned to me after the young men walked out of the classroom, in silence she turned to me and talked to me for an hour. And in that time she said to me, young man, you have something to say. You should be telling people what you saw at that camp in Nazi Germany. Now that was 1972, I believe, and I've been talking ever since.

It's my mission. I feel that I must give back because I had somebody who sacrificed so much. They marched, they sat in, they did everything. Many of them died, including our leader. So I know I had something to struggle for.

MARTIN: What do you say to those who despite all of the change that we've seen in the U.S. and around the world, who are still angry?

Mr. BASS: I try to tell them that we owe so much to so many. We merely have to look at all the graves that are overseas on both sides of the war. Nobody wins the war. Everybody loses. And I've learned that, so war is not the answer for me anymore. And I will say to young people, if you think you're going to solve your problem with violence, you're not going to win. You're going to be a loser. You have so much to give. We all do. We just have to find out what it is that we have within us that we can cultivate by going to school, being on time, listen to your teachers, listen to each other, disagree agreeably.

Learn how to do that, and it's not easily done. Everybody out there is not in love with you. But if you dare - if you dare to be a Daniel, if you dare to confront the evil, it might be painful. Some of your friends will turn their back on you. They'll ostracize you. They won't invite you to the parties. No, you won't play bridge with them anymore. You might be in trouble on your job if you dare to speak up for women and say that they have a right to earn the same money that men do. But that's difficult, difficult to do.

But I ask them to answer this question. Is the price too high? Is the price too high to stand up for what you believe is right? Now, I don't think it is, but I can only speak for me. You see, everybody must speak for him or herself. But you must be willing to give.

MARTIN: Leon Bass, what are you grateful for?

Mr. BASS: Oh, gosh. There's so many things. Just the fact that I woke up this morning, that's a blessing. That I've been able to live 84 years, making it, still getting around. That I had those wonderful people called mom and dad who made me understand that I was special. The blessing that I have is that my wife passed after Alzheimer's. I have two wonderful children. One's a lawyer in California. He has two children, my two grandsons, 28 and 25. I have a daughter in New Jersey. She's the vice president of a bank, and she has two children, 16 and 8. I've been blessed, and I can say they not only have learned and have good careers, they're good human beings. And that's the basic thing that I look for - not only in my children, I look for it in everybody else. And so I try hard to say, I'm blessed, but I want you to feel the same way.

MARTIN: Leon Bass is an educator, a public speaker, a former member of the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion, which provided support after the allied troops liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. Leon Bass, I thank you so much for joining us.

Mr. BASS: It's been my pleasure to be here.

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MARTIN: When we first spoke back in November, Leon Bass shared his moving story about how his experience in wartime changed his life. And at this time of year, many of us are looking for ways to make a change. So we want to hear your story. What are you resolving to do differently in the coming year? What events led you to make a change and how do you plan to stick with it? To tell us more, please visit our Web site on the Tell Me More page at npr.org, or you can call our comment line at 202-842-3522. That number again is 202-842-3522. Please remember to tell us your name and where you live. Tune in next week, and you might just hear your resolution on the air.

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