Bernard Lens

Army Pfc. helped liberate Dachau concentration camp

By Petra Chesner-Schlatter, BucksLocalNews.com


Telling the story of the Holocaust is necessary, so it will never happen again.

That's what people who teach the lessons of the Holocaust strongly believe.

One of those people is U.S. Army Pfc. Bernard Lens of the Makefield Glen section of Lower Makefield Township. He served in Europe during WWII.

Lens, who turns 90 this month, talks with students, telling the story of the Holocaust and what he saw and experienced during The Liberation of Dachau concentration camp.

"We go to schools," Lens said. "We were invited to Washington D.C. two years in a row to present our program."

Lens is a member of Post 697 JWV (Jewish War Veterans.) The group meets monthly and has more than 100 members from Levittown, Bensalem, Yardley and Newtown.

He was part of the American Liberation of the Nazi's Dachau concentration camp.

"We walked in," Lens recalled. "The gates were open. We go in and the first thing we hit is a building. It's an administration building. I see 12 maybe 14 bodies."

Lens said the bodies were civilians who kept records. He said they had been killed so they wouldn't talk.

"We walked around the corner," Lens said. "There were maybe 20 or 25 dead bodies lieing around.

The people, frail and malnourished, needed help. "I asked the captain, 'What do you want to do?' He said, 'Let's get them out. Some need medical care.'"

He approached a building. "God, the door opened -- the stench just threw me back. They looked at me scared. They had never seen an American soldier," Lens said.

When Lens told them he was a Jewish American soldier, he said they seemed relieved.

Lens talked a little slang with them. The thought was "to just take them out -- get them out to the air."

Some were given IVs. "Some could walk," he said. "Some died in my arms -- that's the one thing I'll never forget.

"They would be just walking. They would just fall. They were nothing...The weight of their body was the weight of there bones," Lens said.

"That's what they did to them - starvation," he said. "The things that killed them were TB, malnutrition, not getting medical attention and slave labor."

Lens can attest to being part of the Liberation of a Dachau concentration camp. A photographer he was with took his picture. He is holding a rifle while standing amidst bodies covering the ground beneath him.

One of his jobs was to stand watch over a road leading to the concentration camp. The barbed wire stretched around the camp. He was to shoot with a machine gun if any German soldiers approached.

Before World War II, Lens, a graduate of Central High School in Philadelphia, worked at the Sun shipyard in Chester.

When he came home from the war, he would be in expediting in the clothing industry. He would also work in the sales room. Sometimes he went to New York City when the company had shows. Most recently he worked for a fur company that sold ladies fur coats. Lens retired when he was 70.

Lens has lived in the Yardley area for a dozen years, but lived in Levittown for 35 to 40 years.
His sense of humor is infectious. When asked what he did in the service, he replied, "Run like hell when they wanted volunteers. I was infantry.

"I had special training," Lens said. "I never knew where I was. I moved so fast I didn't get paid for four months."

He was in the 546 Battalion. "I did a stint with General Patton," he said.

Lens said he never regretted being in World War II. "I was single when I went in," he said.
"But I remained a good old 'doughboy,'" he said. "That means you're infantry at the ground -- you're eating the ground. That was a slang expression for infantry.

About being part of the Liberation of Dachau concentration camp he said, "I did what every service person did," Lens said humbly. "We went in, were trained, we did our job.

"The only heroes are those buried with crosses over their graves -- that's my personal opinion," he said.

Lens has been collecting photographs of the Holocaust. He has some very graphic pictures of those who perished in concentration camps. He has pictures taken at Auschwitz concentration camp.

There are bodies upon bodies. They look like skeletons piled one on top of each other in many of these pictures. The mouths of the victims are open. He has photographs of skeletal bodies being put in the crematoria.

Bernard Lens will never forget.

Dachau concentration camp was the first Nazi concentration camp opened in Germany, located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau, about 10 miles northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, which is located in southern Germany.

It is believed that 25,613 prisoners died in the camp and almost another 10,000 in its subcamps, primarily from disease, malnutrition and suicide.

The Americans found approximately 32,000 prisoners, crammed 1,600 to each of 20 barracks, which had been designed to house 250 people each.

Over its 12 years as a concentration camp, the Dachau administration recorded the intake of 206,206 prisoners and 31,951 deaths. Crematoria were constructed to dispose of the deceased. These numbers do not tell the entire story, however.

Prisoners perished from poor sanitation, deprivation of medical care, withholding of nutrients, medical experiments, or beatings and shootings for infractions of the rules or at random.

Beginning in 1942 more than 3166 prisoners in weakened condition were transported to Hartheim Castle near Linz and there were executed by poison gas for reason of their unfitness.