Leon Bass - A Black Soldier in Buchenwald (199X)

Speaker 1: We're now going to move on to another person who experienced the concentration camps in a very different way. His name is Leon Bass. And we met him this week. Actually, one of our reporters at WBAI, Nadine Shaw, went out to Newark, New Jersey on Wednesday, where Leon Bass was speaking at a Holocaust commemoration. Leon Bass was a black soldier in World War II. thought he would be joining his white friends in fighting for the Allies, but instead was sent to a segregated black unit to fight, and he will tell his story. He was speaking at the Old Presbyterian Church in Newark, New Jersey this week.

Leon Bass: But I came here because this is a time of remembrance. And remember we must. I remember. I remember so well the day that I graduated from high school in 1943. The day that I thought I would make a contribution to my country by becoming part of the military. I remember volunteering. But I also remember That I was going to be introduced to what I did not understand and did not comprehend. It's called institutional racism. And so on the day that I was inducted, I went down to the induction center with some of my friends who happened to be white. And when we got to the armory, there stood a sergeant. And when I came to the door, he told me to go this way. And he told my friends to go this way. Because you see, in 1943, all of the armed forces were segregated. My country, my country promoted, promulgated institutional racism and was saying to me, Leon, you are not good enough to be in the mainstream. And so what did they do? They took me and 599 other young men, all black, and sent us to Georgia. Those of you who are too young to understand may not understand what it was like to be in Georgia in 1943 and to be black. It was a painful kind of experience for me. We worked for four months on the Red Clay of Georgia to be good soldiers in the infantry. But when it was over, they said, we didn't need you. We don't need you anymore as infantry soldiers. We want you to be combat engineers. And so the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion was born. And then they sent us for further training. They sent us to Mississippi, then to Texas, then to Louisiana, and then to Arkansas, right outside of Little Rock. And my friends, in all these places, in all of them, we were continually reminded by the society that we were not good enough. Let me give you some examples. When I was in Georgia, I went on a weekend pass to the city of Macon. And I was walking around the city of Jamaica, and it was on a hot summer day, and I came to a water fountain. Now, I'm from Pennsylvania. I don't know what the customs and mores are. I had never experienced that. And so I walk over to this water fountain, and I lean down to drink, and someone grabbed me and said, Hold it, boy. You don't drink here. And he pointed to the sign, and the sign said, White. Then he directed me further down to where there was another water fountain, and above it, the sign said, Colored. You see, he was telling me that I wasn't good enough to drink the water at that fountain. In Beaumont, Texas, I was with a lieutenant. He was driving a jeep, and we were on war games at the time, and it became the noon hour, and he stopped the jeep in front of a restaurant. He got out. He told me that he would meet me back at this spot at a certain time, and then he walked away. He went into the restaurant, leaving me standing on the sidewalk. I knew better than to follow. But I did ask a young man coming by because I was hungry. I said to him, where might I get something to eat? And he looked at me and he said, right here in this restaurant. But you must go around the back, up the alley, knock on the door. And when they come, you give them your money and your order and they'll bring you some food and you can find a place out here to sit down and eat. Because you see, they were saying I wasn't good enough to eat in that restaurant. In Mississippi, I had the good fortune to meet some young ladies from Tubaloo College. That's about, a black college, about seven miles north of Jackson. And I was so impressed, I wanted to go visit Tubaloo. And I go into Grenada, Mississippi, and I buy a bus ticket. I get on the bus, and I give it to the driver. But I had become educated, you see, and I began to read all the signs. And the sign on the bus said, colored seating must be seated to the rear. So I go to the back of the bus, you see. But every seat that was available for me to occupy was already taken. And I stood up for 100 miles or more, looking at empty seats on that bus that I was not permitted to use. Because they were saying to me, you're not good enough. What a damnable thing to have said to you when you were young, 18, and you're trying to do something for your country. I kept my pain inside. We were ready for overseas duty, so we went to Boston and went across the Atlantic Ocean to England. We spent two months in England getting our equipment together. And then we finally left England and went across the English Channel to Le Havre, France. And then we loaded up to a small town in France and we parked alongside the road. This was in 1944. And the weather was severe. It was around the Christmas season. And we had to wait there for orders to come down to tell us what our responsibility would be in the war. And finally, the orders came down and said that our unit, the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion, would be attached to the Third Army under the leadership of General George Patton. But something was happening at that time, something we were not aware of, and that was the enemy. The enemy, in a desperate attempt to try to win the war, had planned to counterattack And when they found a soft spot in the line, they threw in their best Panzer division, and they hit us hard, they pushed us back, and created a bulge in our line. And we now know that to be the Battle of the Bulge. And it was into this battle that the 183rd had his commitment. We were told to go to a place in Belgium called Montalon because there was a bridge there that had to be repaired and rebuilt because it had been blown apart by the enemy. We went there, not knowing that further up the highway in another small town called Bastogne, There were members of a division, I believe it was 101st Airborne. Those men, American soldiers, had been encircled by the enemy and their lives were in jeopardy. They had to be rescued. And so, General Patton and a host of others were getting together all the resources, the men, the tanks, the guns. They had to go up there to rescue those men at Bastogne. But in order to do this, they had to cross that bridge in Montelange. And so the 183rd began its task, working hard to rebuild that bridge. We worked night and day. In spite of the weather, we worked. In spite of the bombing and the strafing by the Stuka airplanes, in spite of the landmines on which some of the men would step, and the shelling of the 88 howitzers of the enemy, we worked night and day. And we rebuilt that bridge. We finished on time. And then all of a sudden, And all the resources came down, they crossed that bridge, they went up to Bastrol, and they helped in the rescue of those men. And that was a glorious day. But we paid a heavy price for that glory. I remember standing in the snow and looking at the grave registration trucks on which the bodies of so many of my friends were placed, and I began to question my wisdom for having joined the army. I was saying to myself, Leon, what are you doing here? You could end up that way. Why are you here? What are you fighting for? You can't get a drink of water and a fountain? We won't let you eat in a restaurant. You can't even get a seat on a bus. So what are you doing here? I had no answers. I was only 19 years of age. I didn't know. But I did know that I was an angry, young, black soldier. But the war went on, and we had to go with it. So we went on to Belgium, to Luxembourg. We crossed the Rhine River at a place called Mainz. We went on up into Germany. And finally, one day, we received orders to go down to a place in Germany called Weimar. Once we were there, we set up our camp and immediately we went to a place that I had not heard of before. The lieutenant said, we're going to a concentration camp. And I looked at him because I had no idea of what he was talking about. You see, in all the training I had, where they sat us down and said, this is why we are fighting this war, no one ever told me what had been happening in Europe since the 1930s. But here, on this day in April of 1945, I was to have the shock of my life because, you see, I was going to walk through the gates of Buchenwald. And I was totally unprepared for that experience because when I walked through that gate, I saw in front of me what I now refer to as the walking dead. I saw human beings, human beings that had been beaten and starved and tortured and denied all the basic things that make life worthwhile. There they stood in front of me. They were thin and bald. They had skeletal faces with deep-set eyes. Their heads had been clean-shaved. They were holding on to each other for stability. They had sores on their body due to malnutrition. One man held out his hands and his fingers were wet together with scabs due to malnutrition. They began to move forward towards me. And they were beginning to say things in many different languages, and I didn't understand, and so I backed away. But then I stopped, and I said to myself, my God, what is this insanity? Who are these people? What have they done? What was their crime that anyone would do something like this to them? I didn't know. I didn't know. A young man who spoke perfect English, he was Polish, he stood up and he said to us that these people, these people of you, they're gypsies, they're Jehovah Witnesses, they are trade unionists, they're communists, they're homosexuals. He went on with a litany of names of groups that had been placed in Buchenwald by the Nazis because the Nazis said they were not good enough. Therefore, we could be terminated, murdered. This was a little much for me. I had nothing in my background, no experience at all that would help me to get a handle on what I was hearing. And so I walked about the camp. I went to a barrack where the men would live, and I opened the door to go in, but the stench, oh, the stench was overpowering. The odor of death and human waste was just too much. I stood at the door holding my breath, And I was ready to leave, but when I turned, I looked down, and there, on the bottom bunk near the door, was a man. An emaciated human being. He was trying desperately to look at me with that skeletal face, with those deep-set eyes. He had such a thin neck, he had a difficult time, but when he did, he looked up at me. He said nothing. Nor did I. I went out, and I closed the door. I walked to another building. The young man said that this is where they stored all parts of the human anatomy in jars of formaldehyde. You see, they did medical experiments on human beings, human guinea pigs, and booby balls. And then they would take all the parts and put them in jars of formaldehyde to preserve the parts. I couldn't read the grammar on the labels, but I could see. And I saw the fingers, the eyes, the ears, the livers, the genitals, all parts of the human anatomy. There was human skin on which someone had done a drawing, some kind of artwork. There was a lampshade made out of human skin. Oh, it boggles the mind when you think about it. But I saw this. I'd been in the camp for several hours now, During that time, I had not seen one child. There were no children. I asked the young man, where are the children? He said, oh, we have children here. But I never saw them. But on this day, as I left this building, I saw mounds of clothing that belonged to little children who didn't survive. I saw that The cap, the sweater, the stockings, the booties, the shoes, all these things that belonged to little children. But I never saw a child. Then I began this long walk to the last building I was to enter. I had to go past the dead and the dying to get there. When I approached, I saw the bodies, the dead bodies, the naked dead bodies, stacked on top of each other, about four feet high, about as wide as one of these sections here in this church. They looked just like the ones I saw when I came in the camp, the minis, but they were more grotesque, you might say, in depth. Their bodies were adjacent to this building called the crematorium. I walked inside. There were six ovens. I looked into just one, and I saw there the remains of some man who had been placed there. I saw his blackened skull, the bongoli ribcage, the ashes of that human being. The young man said they would take the ashes from the oven and use it as human fertilizer on the field so that it could enrich the soil and grow vegetables or whatever they needed to support the Wehrmacht in their war effort. By this time I had seen enough, more than I even cared to talk about here this morning. I just knew somehow that I had to get out of there. My stomach was churning. I was going to be sick. So I got out of there. I walked through the gate and I stood and I waited for my friends to come. I must have waited for about half an hour. But during that time I came to the realization that I was not the same. Something had happened to me in the time that I had been in this camp. Because you see, when I came in through those gates, I was an angry young black soldier, angry at my country for using me, putting me out there to fight and possibly die, to preserve the rights for everybody, but at the same time, they were denying those rights to me. So I was angry. But all of a sudden, my blinders came off. My tunnel vision dissipated. I saw more clearly now that human suffering is not just relegated to me and mine. Human suffering can touch all of us. And I knew now where the enemy happened to be. You see, I have seen the face of evil. I have seen racism. Racism. When a group of people can become so powerful, so strong, that they can dictate terms of life and death for others, that is evil. And so I knew I had to do something about it. I didn't know what. I was only 20 years of age. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I knew deep down I had to do something. So when my friends came, we got back aboard the trucks and we went back to our bivouac area in silence, never to speak about what we had seen at Buchenwald. The war ended. I was sent down to the Philippines to serve with another outfit for another eight months. But then the war in the Pacific ended, and I came home. I was 21 years of age. I put three years of my life in the military, and it was good to be back. I decided to do something about my life. I wanted to go to school, so I went out to Westchester State Teachers College. And they took me in. But my friends, I found that the face of evil was in Westchester. I walked to the high school down towards the college. I walked towards the college with some of my friends. We were going to play football, so we had come back early. And when we got halfway there, they said, let's go into the bookstore and get something to drink. And we all went inside. And the young lady took our order. I ordered a glass of milk. They ordered coffee. But she seemed so nervous. She kept looking at me, and she seemed to be shaking and rattling the cups as she got them together. And she kept looking to the back of the restaurant because there was a man there. He must have been the owner or the manager. And when she got his attention, she seconded to him. He came forward, and she whispered in his ear. And they both turned and looked at me. And I got suspicious. That man in turn walked over to one of the young men. He must have assumed that he was the leader of our group. And he said, in his ear, something existed. And they both turned and looked at me. And by this time, I had put it all together. I knew that the young man walked over to the counter. He looked down at all the cups of coffee there with all the designated amounts of cream and sugar. And he said in a clear voice, we don't want any. And everybody looked in amazement. And then he ushered everybody outside. They were protesting, but he kept saying, let's go, let's go. And when they went outside, they continued to say, why? Why? And it was at this juncture that he said, those people didn't want to serve me up. Can you believe that? Can you imagine how I must have felt after putting in three years of my life, risking everything to make it possible for that lady to have a job and maybe take care of a family, for that man to run a business or manage it? I'd given everything I had to make everybody safe in our democracy. But what were they saying to me in 1946? They were saying, Leon, you're still not good enough. I wanted to do something. I was ready to scream. I wanted to hit somebody. I was ready to do violence, but I held my peace. I remember what my father said. He said, look son, you're going out to Westchester. Don't go out there running your big mouth. Don't go out there trying to change the world. Get your education because they can't take that away from you. And I listened. And I recognized there was some truth in that. And so I kept my peace. I kept my pain inside. And I went down to the university to get my education. But one day I did go out of town. I went to the local Wanda Theater. I bought a ticket. I went in. I gave it to the usher. The usher told me I had to go sit in the balcony. I couldn't sit on the main floor. I walked right past him. I walked in and I sat down on the main floor because that was my protest to see. I was telling him and everybody else I'm good enough. But I was shaking. I was so frightened. I sat there shaking. I don't remember what was playing. I just sat there. Because I knew the police would come. They would take me out and I wouldn't get a chance to finish my education. But nobody came. I sat there for the entire time. But nobody came. And then I got up and I walked out. And I was just ready for someone to grab me on either side. But nobody touched me. And with every step I took back towards my room in town, I got taller and taller. I was ten feet tall because somehow, somehow, I had faced up to evil. And I didn't become evil in the process. I had faced racism. And I had, at least I thought I had won a victory. Because the rest of my educational career, I always sat on the main floor. And he didn't care.

Speaker 3: Come, carry me home. Sweet love, sweet chariot Come, for carry me home Sweet love, sweet chariot © BF-WATCH TV 2021

Speaker 1: Leon Bass, black infantryman in a segregated army unit in World War II. He comes back to the United States and becomes a teacher and then an elementary school principal. He now goes on to talk about Martin Luther King.

Leon Bass: He said, we will wear them down with our capacity for love. And when I heard that, I said, the man is crazy. How are you going to love people who spit on you, who beat you, who bomb your churches, who mistreat your children? How are you going to love them? Hey, but it was a new day. It was a new philosophy. And he was preaching to these people and they were listening and they believed him and they followed him and they had successes. And I'm sitting up in Philadelphia and I'm saying, hope is alive. Things have changed. And you know what happened? One day that giant of a man came to Philadelphia. He came two blocks from my school, and I took all of my children around to that playground. I wanted to hear this giant of a man, and when he walked out, he was a little guy. I said, oh, mama, I guess you expect him to be a giant because he does such wonderful things. But then he opened his mouth, and he began to speak, and I recognized him for the giant that he was. He said things that I needed to hear, things my children needed to hear. He spoke about love. about being a community, about nurturing a responsibility. He spoke about excellence. Can you imagine? Talking to all these poor youngsters about excellence, and he said to them, If you can't be the pine on the top of the hill, then you be the scrub in the valley below. But you be the best. You be the best. And then he admonished them. He said, look, all of you here, all these doctors and lawyers and teachers and chemists and physicists. Oh, no, no. It might fall to some of you to sweep the streets. So be it. But if you sweep the streets, I want you to sweep the streets like Beethoven wrote his music. Sweep the streets like Michelangelo painted those pictures. Sweep the streets like Shakespeare wrote his poetry. You'll be the best that you can be. I was mesmerized. I just stood there looking at this man. I went back to my school, determined that I would become more involved, and I did. I found myself in 1963 down in Washington, D.C. with 250,000 other people. outside in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where the same giant of a man was talking about his dream. And I heard him say, I have a dream that one day, People will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream, he said, and I stood there with tears just coming down my face. Oh, but I wasn't alone. Oh, no. There were a host of people there that day. Rich people, poor people, white people, black people, Jews, Gentiles, Catholics, Protestants, and many of them were crying unashamedly. And I came back to Philadelphia, determined to do something more. I became an elementary school principal, and I worked hard at it. One day, Dr. King was assassinated. I remember so vividly that terrible time. But I received a call a few months later telling me that I should go to a high school because they had appointed me principal of the Benjamin Franklin High School, one of the most difficult schools in the city of Philadelphia. All male, no young ladies at all. These young men were angry young men because they'd been told they weren't good enough. They were protesting at the Board of Education. They said they were tired of the Mickey Mouse education they were getting and they wanted to do something about it. things had gotten ugly when it was into this that i was going to be principal and when i walked up to the school all these young men were standing out around the front angry it seems that no one was going to class and i tried to get through the crowd to get to the office when one young man looked at me and said hey mister you the new dude they made principal here and i swallowed hard and said yes That's what they tell me. And he called all these tough guys around, and they said, Mr., what are you going to do to change this school? What are you going to do to make it better? And I said, give me a break, son. I just got here. And one young man said, look, if you don't do something, mister, if you don't do it right away, we're going to burn this place down. And I knew I had to get busy. And so I began to go around the school and the neighborhood and everywhere, talking to people, listening, writing down everything. I had a dull headache most of the time. But one day, on my tour of duty, I came to a class. And there was a lady there. She was trying desperately to talk to these young men, but they weren't listening to her. They had tuned her out. Somebody had told them they weren't good enough. And they weren't listening. They were rude. And I found out that she was not the teacher. She was a visitor. She was a survivor. She had come to share her experiences, her pain, with these young men. But they had their own pain. You see, they had been told they weren't good enough. And they were angry. They didn't want to listen to her. But I understood that because, you see, I had been there. But then I understood her pain, too, because I had been there. And so I had to stand up. I had to say, all right, fellas, cool it, listen. What she says is true because I was there. And they got quiet for just a minute. You know how young men can be. They only give you a minute. But she began to tell about her pain. She told how she'd lost her grandmother and grandfather, her mother and her father, her brothers and sisters and cousins and loved ones. Everybody that she cared for that had come into Auschwitz had gone first to the gas chambers. And then to those despicable ovens. And when it was all over, only she, Nina Celeste was her name, only she came out alive. Those young men listened. I know they did. I know about the questions they asked. Then they came up. They looked at the numbers that were tattooed on her arm. They shook her hand. And they did something that was totally out of character. They walked out of that classroom in silence. And she turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, we talked for about a half hour. And she said, why don't you go share what you have with the Interfaith Council? I said, all right, I will do. As if I didn't have enough to do, I said yes. I went down and I spoke to the Interfaith Council on the Holocaust. That was 1970 or 71. I've been talking ever since. I go all over this country talking to anyone that will listen. It's what brings me here today to tell you that the Holocaust took place and we must remember that. Because there are people out there that want to sweep it under the rug, sanitize it, laundry it, say it didn't happen. We can't afford to let that happen. They did the same thing to slavery. Oh yeah. When I came from school, nobody told me about that institution. Teachers did not teach me. I had to be an adult going to graduate school at Temple University before I knew how ugly slavery was. And here in the 90s, they're going to do the same thing to the Holocaust if we don't do what we're supposed to do. If we don't remember... And so I come here to tell you that, but more than that, not only must we remember, we must know why it happened and what we might do to keep it from happening again. And I submit to you, you might judge me that it happened because of racism. I'm talking about the evils now, the bigotry, the prejudice, the discrimination, the segregation, the anti-Semitism, the sexism, ageism, all of those evils that impinge on us daily, right here in this place, in this city, in our homes, in our church, wherever we are. All those evils are impinging on us, hitting us daily, trying to make us less than what we ought to be. That's what we have to stand up and fight. Those are the evils that created the Holocaust. And you say, well, Leon, that's easily said, but it's a hard thing to do. Yes, I'm not saying it's easily done. But I didn't come here to plant a rose garden. I came here to tell you the truth. And if you dare to deal with the truth, then you can be vulnerable. It'll be painful. Oh, yes. You dare to be a Daniel. You dare to stand up and walk into the den and deal with those forces. Yes, you can be had. They'll talk about you. They'll call your name. You won't get your promotion on your job. You won't get your best marks in school because somehow you dare to stand for the truth and what is right. And so I must ask you to answer one question, and then I'm going to stop. You must answer the question, is the price too high? Think about that. Think about it. You're waiting for a promotion on your job. The boss comes in. He's got everybody around ready to make the announcement that you're going to be the new foreman or the new president or vice president. And just before he does that, he tells a joke. Uh-oh, not a funny joke. A denigrating, put-down joke about some ethnic group. Polish, Catholic, Asian, Hispanic, black, white. It doesn't matter. He tells it. Everybody laughs. But not you. You dare to be a Daniel. You dare to stand up and say to Mr. Jones, I'm sorry, that has no place here. That is totally uncalled for. Uh-oh, there goes the promotion. You're not going to get that extra money. It's all going down the tube. Is the price too high? Think about it. Oh, they come to your house for bread. These are your friends. They're sitting around the table, and they're talking to each other. And they begin to talk about the neighborhood. Oh, you know, the neighborhood is going to the dogs. We've got those Asians coming in here, and the Spits, the neighbors. Oh, this place is going to the dogs. And you sit there. You hear this. And you say to them, Sally, Henry, I'm sorry, that's totally out of place. You don't say that. What do you mean? You don't say that. We don't do this in this house. Well, we don't have to stay in your house. They get up, and you don't come to our house anymore and then walk out in a huff. Your so-called friend is the price too high. Think about it. And so you say, Leon, what can you give me to help fight the battle? What ammunition do you have? I only have one thing. I know you have to become educated. You have to learn. That's basic. The only one thing I have that is so strong, so powerful, is love. And young people hear this, they say, that's corny. But I'm not talking about the love in the Inquirer tabloid. You know what I'm talking about. No. Not the love on television or in the movies. The love that somehow organized this program that got everybody here because of your love. That's love. You came here from your various jobs or whatever you have to do that you're very busy, and you come here because you have an interest. That's love. I came all the way from Yachtley, Pennsylvania, got up early this morning to make sure I was here on time. And I don't even know you. That's love. So I'm going to close with the words of James Baldwin who died two years ago, I believe. It was James Baldwin who said, Either we hold to one another or that sea will engulf us and the light will go out. We have the awesome responsibility, you and I, to keep the light shining.

Speaker 1: Thank you.