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Posted on 06/04/2004 6:42:54 AM PDT by veronica
HARRISBURG, Pa. - With his draft number coming up and his anger rising over reports of Nazi Germany's human-rights abuses, Abe Plotkin says it was an easy decision to close his Scranton shoe store and enlist in the Army in 1942.
"We knew they were mistreating the people," Plotkin recalled in a recent interview. "We didn't know how bad, but we knew they were mistreating them."
Plotkin soon found out: After participating in some of the Army's biggest battles in France and Germany, he witnessed the aftermath of Nazi Germany's mass murders at the Ohrdruf labor camp. The experience motivated him: He helped survivors resettle, took photographs of the horror that are now in museums, and has spoken about it to countless students and community groups.
This weekend, he is to be among 100 American World War II veterans who will receive France's prestigious Legion of Honor award in ceremonies in that country marking the 60th anniversary of the massive D-Day invasion of Normandy's beaches.
The Allies' June 6, 1944, invasion was the first breach in Adolf Hitler's Atlantic wall and led to the liberation of France and the defeat of Nazi Germany.
In part, the French government views the bestowal of the Legion of Honor awards - the first time France is extending the honor to American World War II veterans - as symbolic of a larger gesture to the millions of Americans who fought the Nazis.
Those who know Plotkin, now 90, say the award befits him.
"He really is a man who wants to leave the world a better place," said Tova Weiss, the coordinator of the Holocaust Education Resource Center in Scranton. "And his mission is to try to get young people to understand about prejudice, about racism, where it begins and what it can lead to."
His speeches, she said, often deal with how many different races, religions and creeds of people were enslaved by Hitler.
And while Plotkin said he fought for the ideals of all Americans, his rabbi, David Geffen, said he is particularly proud that a fellow Jewish veteran should receive such a distinction.
Plotkin worked tirelessly, the rabbi said, to help resettle the displaced survivors, a monumental task that the military did not necessarily relish.
"He was trying to help his fellow Jews who had suffered so terribly," Geffen said. "I think that is what has motivated him throughout the rest of his life."
Plotkin's photographs of survivors and the camps are displayed at the National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington, D.C., and contained in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial institute.
As his unit's cryptographer, Plotkin wasn't a photographer; but he had a camera with him and he said he "wanted the outside world to know what was going on."
It wasn't until several decades later that he began speaking publicly about it - prompted, he said, by propaganda that the Holocaust was faked.
"Are these guys trying to tell me that I didn't see what I saw?" he remembered thinking.
Plotkin sailed to Europe with his unit, the 284th Field Artillery Battalion in 1944, and landed on Utah Beach in the weeks following the invasion.
Attached to various infantry forces, the 284th fought across France and into Germany.
His unit was part of the Third Army that counterattacked at the Battle of the Bulge. He recalled backing the 5th Rangers Battalion in their grueling fight at the Saar River. And he remembers the unit's 105 mm shells practically bouncing off the thick walls at the Nazi-held medieval fortress of Metz.
In April 1945, his unit was among the first Americans to discover the Ohrdruf camp.
The camp was quiet and abandoned, except for a few survivors. Dead, emaciated men lay strewn on the ground, freshly killed by German guards fleeing the allies' advance. Corpses were piled in sheds and left in charred heaps.
"We were actually stunned," Plotkin said. "How could any human being treat other human beings in such a horrific manner?"
As his work turned to helping the displaced, Plotkin burned with duty.
He wrote letters in hopes of securing residency in the United States for survivors. His letters home about the desperate condition of the survivors prompted a massive food and clothing drive in Scranton.
Once, when he had a three-day pass to Paris, he lugged a bag stuffed with letters from survivors seeking their families - one was even addressed to Albert Einstein - to mail them, he said.
He recounted amazing stories of survival, such as the one in which parents hid their boy in a sack and a camp bunkhouse for fear the German guards would kill a youngster not old enough to work.
After the war, Plotkin was honorably discharged as a corporal. The 284th has had many reunions since then and Plotkin has been back to Paris three times with his wife. And he has had time to consider what his service meant.
"When they talk about heroes, my feeling is that practically anybody who served would be a hero," Plotkin said. "By doing your job, you make a winning team, and I think that's the reason why we won."
Great article. This man represents what is best in Americans. May God Bless him.
FYI.
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