By Rebecca Schnitzer, Correspondent
When the Battle of the Bulge occurred, Leonard Feinberg found himself in Marvie, a little town outside of Bastogne, Germany.
“We replaced the guys in the 103rd Airborne, who were holding that town,” Feinberg said.
As Feinberg’s regiment started going forward, they came under fire from behind.
“All I know is, they opened up on us and a couple of the guys got hit and there we were. How did we bypass them?” Feinberg still wonders. “So then we retreated forward and it was all woods after that and we just wandered around – this whole regiment.”
Feinberg ended up being the only medic left with his regiment.
The regiment began marching back in a long column with Feinberg in the middle for easy access to the wounded. As they started marching, a machine gun opened up and took down several men in the front of the column. Feinberg and some others jumped into a ditch to escape the bullets.
Feinberg looked around and saw a hill behind them with bushes at the top.
“The ground was all open behind us. I set the Olympic record for the uphill dash wearing galoshes in the snow!” Feinberg laughed.
He got to the top, waiting to see if anyone was coming and wondered where he could go. He started walking along the line of bushes and noticed two men walking up. He dove into the bushes and waited to hear what language the two men were speaking – were they American or German?
“I’m lying there in the bushes, in the snow and a mortar comes in right near me. That’s when I got hit in the thigh and that’s when I got the other hole in my helmet,” he said.
Feinberg saw an open space next to him with more woods. Thinking he could run out-of-sight from the Germans, he got up and started running.
“I get halfway across the open space and a guy yells out in German,” Feinberg remembered. “So I said to him, in my best German, ‘I have my hands up!’ and he opens up with his gun, so I yelled again. Finally, I remembered the German word for medic and yelled ‘I’m a medic!’ and he said, ‘Come here.’”
He joined a few other Americans who were captured.
“You know that expression that your whole insides fell down? That’s the only way I could describe it.”
After working briefly at a German hospital, Feinberg was moved to several different places including a POW camp in Gerolstein. They kept the POWs in an old factory and took the prisoners out on work duty. When word got around that Germans were ready to move some people out, Feinberg was itching to go, but another prisoner was not. They switched names and both went their separate ways.
“I wanted to try to get back to a place where the Red Cross would know I was there so my family could know what happened.”
After Gerolstein, they ended up in Flomersheim where they kept about 100 POWs in an old beer hall. A typical meal there was a piece of bread. Feinberg had gotten sick with an infected throat and as a medic, had his thermometer with him.
“I think it had something to do with my religious background, because they always came to me first, trying to get me to go to work,” he said.
After showing them several times that he had a fever, they took Feinberg’s thermometer away and made him go to work.
“It was the best thing they could have done, but they didn’t realize it,” Feinberg laughed.
“It was a night job where we were unloading boxcars in this little town nearby,” Feinberg explained. “And I discovered as we were taking these cardboard boxes out of the boxcars, that there was food in them.
“We were hungry and here I see cans of tuna, biscuits and I discovered that the boxes didn’t have a lot of tape and I could stick my hand in, take some out, stick them in my pockets and I thought, ‘this is great!’”
Feinberg shared his newfound treasure with the other POWs and pretty soon, people were lining up for work duty, eager to smuggle food back for each other.
They marched the POWs 60 kilometers, from Flomersheim, through Bonn and all the way to Cologne. Afterwards, they moved the POWs in boxcars.
Feinberg ended up in a real prison camp in Lindberg.
“There were hundreds of guys there. But finally, I got registered with the Red Cross.”
Representatives of the Red Cross from Switzerland were at the prison camp handing out packages to the prisoners containing toilet paper and other toiletries.
“The one thing was, they refused to register anyone as Jewish. Evidently, sometime before Christmas, which was quite awhile beforehand, there had been a bombing nearby and there were some unexploded bombs. The Germans came in and went through the list and picked out all the Jewish guys and made them a bomb disposal squad. After that, the Red Cross refused to register anyone as Jewish.”
As quickly as they were moved into the prison camp, they were moved out.
Feinberg recalled a day when American planes decided to bomb the railroad yard. They were locked in the boxcars, people panicking, praying they would not get hit.
“Fortunately, we were not one of the things that got hit! They hit just about everything but us.”
The prison guards took the POWs out and marched them to a railroad station. They put them back in boxcars and they rode to a wooded area in the middle of nowhere.
Someone came over and opened the boxcar that Feinberg was in and they came flying out of the boxcar as the planes began to bomb the tracks again. Feinberg and another prisoner ran out into a big field with their Red Cross packages.
“We ran out into the middle of the field and took the toilet paper. I made a big ‘P’ and he made a ‘W’ and we stood there and waved as the planes came in.”
Some other prisoners lined up in the field and also made a ‘PW’ with their bodies.
“There was a little newspaper article and the article said ‘Human PW saves train.’ But they didn’t mention my toilet paper!” Feinberg laughed.
At this point, the prison guards marched them to Braunfels, Germany.
“There was a big field that was surrounded by barbed wire and that’s where we were,” Feinberg explained.
Feinberg noticed that across the street was some houses and saw an alley between the houses. He told a couple other guys about it and they devised a plan.
They approached a guard and Feinberg told him they weren’t feeling well and wanted to see the town’s doctor.
Feinberg and a couple other men were allowed to go towards town. When they got there, the other men went into town while Feinberg ran down the alley.
“I didn’t want to go into the town. I stayed by myself and I was cold and miserable.”
There was a big hill next to the town and a big cave in the hill. Feinberg went into the cave but he wasn’t alone for long.
“All of a sudden, in come all these civilians. It turns out it was their air raid shelter!”
Feinberg noticed a young girl and her family in the cave with him. Knowing what he was, the girl would come over to him when nobody was looking and point out the people to stay away from.
The little girl, Gretel, told him that her father had been in a concentration camp for “being against the Nazis.” Feinberg knew he had made a friend. He told her he wanted to go to her house.
“It was only a matter of days and the town was taken by the Americans,” he said.
Feinberg had been a POW for three months.
Following his discharge from the army, Feinberg returned to Rutgers and completed his Bachelor of Science degree in June 1947. He then earned a Masters of Science in biochemistry at George Washington University and a Ph. D. in biochemistry at Penn State University. After graduation he spent four years in industrial research and 13 years in cardiology research. He worked at Philadelphia General Hospital and then became the vice president and director of a private clinical laboratory.
Feinberg tells his story with a smile and a quirky sense of humor. He says he wants to write a book about his experience.
“I was just at the right age where I was looking for adventure. This was the ultimate adventure.”
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