The Diary of an ‘Undesirable’

From Puduromedia and PRX. It's Latino Usa. I'm Mariaino Rossa Today. The story of the first Mexican American to register as a Holocaust survivor and the scars that stayed with him. In October of twenty ten, a man in his late eighties walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, d C. And then registered himself as a Holocaust survivor.

Anthony Savedo grew up in a Mexican household in Pasadena, California, east of Los Angeles, and much of his childhood was pretty typical of the time. He played with his cousins, went to school, attended church. But then one day in the mid nineteen thirties, when Anthony was almost ten years old, he noticed that all his family's furniture had been packed up. So he asked his mom what was going on.

What's happened?

Where are you going?

They said, no, we're all going, and he says where are we going? He says, we're going to Mexico and says, why is it? Because we were told to leave the United States.

Anthony himself had been born in the US, but his parents they were undocumented, and at the time, many Mexican American families were being pressured to leave the US in something known as the Mexican repatriation in the nineteen thirties. Mexicans were the largest and most recent immigrant group to settle in the US, and following the Great Depression, they

Oh, they call me gringo because I was born in the United States and I know half English and half Spanish, and that was kind of difficult.

But Anthony gets by, DAPs, grows up, and then World War Two starts, and right at the end of nineteen forty one, Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor and the United States enters the war.

No matter how long it may take us, the American people in their right, just Mike will win collab.

By this point, Anthony is seventeen, and all of a sudden, the US is trying to enlist any men of fighting age, including Anthony, even though he'd been repatriated to Mexico.

The Consul general the United States was after me because of my age. Getting ready to go back in the United States and serve your country.

Yes, sir, he was drafted.

So he packed his bags, said goodbye to his family, and headed back to the US to answer the call. He went to California and was trained to be an army medic, and then in the fall of nineteen forty four, he was sent to Europe to.

Meet the German drive Generalizeenhower. Here at Supreme Headquarters, resourcefuly regrouped his forces, giving key in.

A group of soldiers he was with took a train to a small town in Germany called Phillipsburg. By this time it was late December of a really hard winter, and when they got out of the train, snow was wat deep in some places. A few miles away, the Battle of the Bulge was underway. It was a German's last major offensive of the war. It was difficult for

While he was doing repair jobs. First aid sutures and sewing thumbs, cutting a leg off and throwing a turniquet and sewing up the leg the stump, doing this and that as a medica.

The battle lasted for days until finally Anthony's unit ran out of ammunition. The Americans began destroying everything, equipment, firearms, anything that the Nazis could use against them, and they decided it was time to surrender, so a scout walked out and waved a white flag. It was January sixth, nineteen forty five. Anthony and thousands of other American soldiers were taken to a prison camp known as Stalic nine B in bad Orb, Germany. The prisoners were referred to

And the commander said, all American Jews with names Jewish, take two steps forward.

Anthony says that at that point people who had any markers of their Jewish faith little star medals or dog tags with an H written on them for Hebrew, desperately began to try to get rid of him, but to no avail. That day, the Nazis selected about ninety Jewish soldiers and another two hundred and sixty soldiers labeled undesirable men who they simply thought look Jewish, consider trouble makers, or any type of other This included twenty year old Anthony.

You couldn't kneel, you couldn't squat. For six days in those box cars, fellas couldn't defecate that all, they had to do it right there. And for six days you couldn't eat nothing. You could have nothing to eat, nothing to drink, but the snow that hit the from the cracks. You tried or punk your hand through the slot window to get the drops of water from the rain.

Eventually they arrived at a concentration camp known as Berga. It was a subcamp of Buchenwald, one of the largest Nazi concentration camps.

It was so snowy that you couldn't catch the glimpse very well, but you see like towers of houses.

The men were divided into groups of sixty to eighty men per Barck. There were other prisoners in the camp as well, mainly European Jews, but they were separated from the American prisoners. The captured soldiers were forced to work in the camp. Many were put to work digging tunnels for underground fuel factories the Nazis were working on. Since Anthony was one of just a few medics in the camp, he was tapped with trying to keep the men alive

March twentieth, nineteen forty five, Yesterday our planes dropped leaflets as well as bombs. Six men were sent to a British hospital. Five more men escaped today. Goldstein's body was returned here today for burial. He was shot while attempting to re escape, so they say, but actually was recaptured and shot through the head.

Anthony's diary became a record of daily life in the camp.

March twenty second, nineteen forty five, Private Schultz died of malnutrition. This is the fourth man to die. The weather is beauty and it looks like spring, which has finally come to Germany. By this time, back home, I'd be suffering from hay fever.

We had got one hundred grams of bread per week. The one hundred bred brands of bridge is not much. It was a mixed of barley with sawdust, ground glass and ground sam.

March twenty fifth, nineteen forty five, Palm Sunday. No chances of going to a church, but still our prayers are holding everyone up.

This day.

It reminded me of the hundreds of people attending Mass at the cathedral in Durango, Mexico. I wish I could be there now. March thirtieth, nineteen forty five, Good Friday. On this holy day, our thoughts are all at home and of the coming Easter Sunday. It is also the feast of the Passover for our Jewish comrades, and they also think of home and family.

As the journal entries went on, the more Anthony wrote about the horrors in Berga, men from his unit began to die in greater numbers from alnutrition or beatings, or being overworked.

April second, nineteen forty five, two more of our men died today, and one last night makes three plus sixteen makes nineteen. Living in unsanitary conditions, water must be boiled before it is drunk, no latrines. Deaths are increasing in great number. Men forced to work in the mind whether they are ill or not.

Sometimes Anthony simply recorded deaths.

Rogers March ninth, nineteen forty five, Young March twelfth, nineteen forty five, Goldstein March tenth, nineteen forty five, Goldberg March twenty fifth.

I knew that maybe someday it would be a valuable thing for us to know that that there was important.

I had a fountain ten with me that I was rising all the time with it, and I don't know how God gave me that. Ain't the less.

Coming up on Latino USA, American forces inch closer to defeating the Nazis and liberating the men at Berga.

Received very good news today. The Americans are two hundred and fifty kilometers from here and moving fast.

Stay with us, Hey, we're back. And when we left off, twenty year old Anthony Esevedo was documenting his daily life as a prisoner inside a Nazi concentration camp known as Berga. Producer Jennie Yamoga picks up the story now, but it themples.

I hear at shase that the next few days will be spent building up.

Our forces east of the Rhine. By April, US troops had successfully crossed the Rhine River, one step closer to defeating Germany. Wile British and American troops were crossing the Rhine north of the Roar, the last German resistance west of the Rhine collapsed. They were nearing Berga, and Anthony and his fellow prisoners were hearing rumors.

Received very good news today. The Americans are two hundred and fifty kilometers from here and moving fast. Received good news. Americans are only two high hundred kilometers away from here, which means they're excellent news today. Americans are only one hundred kilometers from here. Said that our boys were sixty kilometers from us.

The Nazis evacuated the sub camp and forced the remaining soldiers on a death march that would last three weeks and over two hundred miles.

April ninth, nineteen forty five, we marched ten kilometers. Today. We're supposed to go to the town of hof but we arrived to a big barn for our air corps were bombing that town continuously. We started out with three hundred and four men from Berga. We now have two hundred and eighty seven men.

Many of the men died on the march. Their bodies were left by the side of the road.

Stuart April fifth, nineteen forty five. Vogel April ninth, nineteen forty five.

Weeks went by. Then suddenly, very early in the morning, the men heard firing like thunder in the distance. The Americans were getting closer. The Nazis wanted to continue marching and threaten the men that they shoot them if they didn't continue, but Anthony and another medic stood their ground, and the Nazis, afraid of the advancing troops, fled.

We started hearing the rumbling getting closer, and we all started to run towards the highway.

When they got to the highway, they found the eleventh Armor Division. The men were finally free again.

We were liberated today April the twenty third, nineteen forty five.

Out of three hundred and fifty American soldiers, about half of the men's ur y Berga, and many of the remaining men were close to death. When Anthony was first captured, he weighed one hundred and forty nine pounds. By the time he was set free, seven the surviving men, including Anthony, were taken to hospitals, and by June they were on their way back home to the US. But there was one condition, one that the former captives didn't quite understand, so we.

Had to sign it up and David where we had to swear that we never were in a condition or suffered in a condition that we had got through by the Germans.

The war was still going on and the US military wanted to keep exactly what went on inside the Nazi prison camps a secret, since they had soldiers being held as prisoners of war and believed information getting out could put them at risk. Some men like Anthony, were told they had to sign this document.

They threatened us to be jailed federally by the United States government.

The National Security or not. For the men who survived Burka, it felt like they were being told to keep their trauma a secret, like they didn't have a choice. So Anthony signed the document and for years he didn't talk much about what he saw in Berga. After the war, Anthony went back to Mexico then settled in California. He got married and he started a family, and he worked as an engineer in the aerospace industry for many years. Here's his son, fer Nando A. Savedo.

I just remember sitting at the table and it was being a kid that's real picky about what they're eating. And I just remember my dad stating when I would leave the edges of the bread when I was a prisoner a war, that's all I had to eat, And that just stuck with me.

Fernando is one of Anthony's four children, and he says his father did a pretty good job of hiding what he'd been through.

If you look at my dad in those years, you could not tell he had gone through anything that was an extreme in nature, because I mean, he hid his PTSD so well.

Still, it was impossible to hide everything.

Oh, my dad would just take off, he'd be gone, I don't know where he went. And then I'd hear my mom go out there and it's like where everybody go. And then I'll see you out there and I hear my dad crying. I would see my mom massage in the back of his head and I would ask, you know, what's wrong with what's wrong with Poppy? And she would say he's going through something traumatic. And then my dad would say, I'll be okay, I'll be okay. And that happened often.

Fernando also remembers how at home his father always kept his war diary on the nightstand. It was small and greenish gray, with a red outline of a lion and the words a wartime log on the cover. It was worn, a little beat up, like it belonged inside a glass case in some museum.

He had it at the nightstand at the end of the hallway, and it was just sitting there.

For Fernando and his siblings. It was just an old book filled with his father's handwriting, some sketches, and a few empty pages.

Even our older brother kind of doodled in the back with crowns. Thankfully we didn't mess up all the really important pages. It was in the back where there was just blank pages.

And for a long time the diary just sat there on the nightstand, holding Anthony's secrets within its yellow pages. As an adult, Fernando took a job at the same company as his father, and eventually, during their long commutes, his dad told him the story about what he went

Throughout my years, I do remember my father telling me, you know, he would shake his head and he felt very hurt.

He was very hurt.

Even the amount and the extremness of his PTSD, people would even question that.

Fernando knew his father's story needed to be told and wanted to share it on a larger scale. In two thousand and six, he reached out to CNN, and two years later his father did a public interview.

He says, I can't believe this. Nobody knows about us. At eighty four as all who shares the diary, no one was supposed to see. Two more of our men died today and while lost last night makes three.

As a result, one man named Martin Vogel found out what happened to his brother Jack, who was in Burgo with Anthony and died there.

My brother was a year and a half older than I was, but we were very, very close. He had finished two years of college. The draft board called him and said, your name has come up. You have to go into the army. And by the time I was eighteen, I went into the army, and when I came home they told me that my brother had died in a prisoner of Rock camp.

And for sixty three years Martin had no idea what happened to his brother, But when he read that CNN article, he saw that Anthony wrote his brother's name and his diary as one of the deaths in.

Berga Vogel, April ninth, nineteen forty five.

It was the first time, after years of searching, that he finally learned about his brother's final moments. His brother had died in Anthony's arms. Martin still finds it hard to talk about his brother.

It brings back memories. After all, we only lived He was nineteen when he went into the service, and we had only nineteen years together. So it wasn't that long, but we had a wonderful relationship. Just talking about it now, I find it difficult to continue a coherent conversation because I get so upset.

Anthony's diary also caught the attention of Kira Schuster, a curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who reached out to him.

And that was a big part of why I did reach out to them, was because I wanted to see if maybe we could acquire his diary for our permanent collection, because at that point we had no original artifacts in our permanent collection from the Burke Camp.

In twenty ten, Anthony and his family visited Washington, d c. And he formally donated the items he saved from his captivity, a red cross armband, a small palm cross, a Catholic prayer book, some personal photographs, and most importantly, his diary. The museum has more than two hundred diaries in its collection, but this diary, it was the first written by an American born survivor of a concentration camp.

I speak for all my buddies, it with her. Yeah, I do this with honor. I turned this over to the.

Halla Fartusium Kira says the donation received quite a bit of press and led to many other survivors of Berga or their families also donating materials, including three other diaries from the camp. During his visit, Kira introduced Anthony to a Holocaust survivor who was a volunteer at the museum.

And so I introduced the two of them, and he was so taken aback and surprised, and he looked at me and he was like, thank you so much for introducing me to her. I've never met a Holocaust survivor before. And I said, but you're a Holocaust survivor.

But until that moment, he never thought of it that way. It's a sensitive topic. Who should be considered a Holocaust survivor and who isn't. So many suffered during the war, but the prisoners of war held at the Burga concentration Camp were used as slave laborers, and their living conditions were so horrific that scholars consider them survivors of the Holocaust. Anthony registered as a Holocaust survivor in twenty ten.

And I can confirm Tony was the first Mexican American Catholic Holocaust survivor to register with the museum.

Anthony Azevedo died on February eleventh, twenty eighteen. He was ninety three. Before Anthony shared his story in a big way, he visited a local school in California and spoke to a group of junior high students about his experience in a Nazi concentration camp. It was one of the first times he shared his story, and he was taken aback that the students they didn't really know anything about the soldiers held at Berga.

You see tears coming down. It affects them, but they all say, why didn't my father tell me about this? And why did my grandma didn't tell me about this? Why didn't the school tell us about this?

Anthony's own story came close to not being included in this history until, with the help of a little gray green diary and a fountain pen, he wrote himself.

In In two thousand and nine, a year after Anthony did a public interview with CNN, the US Army finally recognized that three hundred and fifty soldiers held as prisoners at Berga sixty four years later. This episode was produced by Janis Yamoca and edited by Annie Avilis. It was mixed by Stephanie Lebau. The Latino USA team also includes Julia Caruso, Jessica Ellis, Victoria Streva, Renad Junior, Andrea Lopez Grussado, Luis Luna, Glordi, mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Nor Saudi and

Latino USA is made possible in part by California Endowment, building a strong state by improving the health of all Californians, The Heising Simons Foundation unlocking knowledge, opportunity and possibilities more at hsfoundation dot org, and the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide.