Positivity: Death camp liberator will receive Shofar of Freedom
An honor for a hero
October 5, 2008
LeRoy Petersohn still has the dreams.
They stem from that one big nightmare, the one he lived beginning May 5, 1945.
That was the day he and other members of the 11th Armored Division of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army came upon the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
What he saw and experienced after that was more than any 23-year-old should see. As an Army medic, he already had seen the horrors of war. But this was worse.
“It was a horrible sight,” he said. “This was definitely a death camp.”
From the stacks of bodies to the crematoriums — with the ovens still roaring — Petersohn saw things that haunt him to this day, as an 86-year-old retiree and widower in Boulder Hill.
Since that time, he has married, raised four sons and a daughter, and worked 46 years as a printer for The Beacon News.
He has been recognized time and again for his courage at Mauthausen — the work of a man at his best, trying to salvage something from the ashes of mankind at its worst.
In 2005, at a reunion at Mauthausen, he was awarded the Golden Badge of Honor from the president of Austria. As a member of the Armed Services, he earned a Purple Heart, two Bronze Stars and a Medical Badge, among other decorations. He still carries shrapnel he has had inside him since the Battle of the Bulge.
Now he will receive another recognition.
On Thursday, Petersohn, along with other members of the 11th Armored Division, will receive the Shofar of Freedom Award from Temple Israel in Albany, N.Y.
The award has been given by the congregation for the past 20 years to those “who risked their lives to save members of the Jewish people and others as well,” according to Rabbi Paul B. Silton of Temple Israel.
“One of my greatest privileges and honors for the past 20 years at Temple Israel has been bringing and honoring these extraordinary redeemers of our people,” Silton said in a recent letter.
The award presentation is timed to coincide with Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.
Petersohn, his son, Brian, and other members of the 11th Armored Division will be on hand to accept the award before the entire Temple Israel congregation.
While Petersohn will accept with the 11th Armored, he also will be recognized individually for the work he did with the camp prisoners — particularly one of its smallest and most fragile ones.
He found a baby girl while he was searching the women’s barracks. Maybe seven weeks old, she suffered from massive infection with huge open sores. Petersohn and his commanding officer operated on her, lancing the sores, sewing them back up and praying the penicillin would work on the infection.
The baby lived, and for many years Petersohn wondered what had happened to her. The topic would often come up whenever he would talk about World War II.
“He’d say, ‘I wonder whatever happened to that baby,’” Brian Petersohn said.
LeRoy Petersohn found out in 2003, when Dr. Hana Berger-Moran, a vice president for her family’s Biosciences firm in California, e-mailed the 11th Armored Division site, looking for the men who saved her life.
In 2005, at the 60th reunion in front of Mauthausen, LeRoy Petersohn and Hana met again.
“She came in the door, and she hugged me so tight I thought she was going to kill me,” Petersohn said. “I had wondered about her, and she had often wondered who it was that saved her life.” …..
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