How atrocities opened WWII veteran’s eyes

By Emily Richmond

Friday, Feb. 20, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Leon Bass travels the country speaking about what he witnessed when he arrived at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

U.S. forces liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. The following day Bass, a sergeant serving in a segregated unit of black soldiers, was among the soldiers sent to assist with relief efforts there.

The Americans weren’t prepared for what they encountered.

“The stench of death, of human waste and despair, it was all around us,” said Bass, who was in Las Vegas this week to share his story with students. “That kind of experience never leaves you.”

And neither does the obligation to tell others of the horrors that occur when hatred, prejudice and intolerance go unchecked, he said.

However, the 84-year-old Bass, a lifelong educator, hasn’t always spoken publicly about his experiences at Buchenwald.

On Wednesday, Bass addressed 400 students at a conference sponsored by the Nevada Governor’s Advisory Council on Education Relating to the Holocaust, the Clark County School District and the Anti-Defamation League at the Sands Convention Center. On Thursday he spoke at the Adelson Educational Campus in Summerlin.

In an interview with the Sun, Bass said he had been “an angry soldier,” resentful of his assignment to a segregated unit and unsure why he was fighting. Was it to preserve America’s freedom, even though many of the rights and privileges of citizenship were denied to him because of his race?

“I was so full of ‘Vitamin I’ — what was important to me,” Bass said.

At Buchenwald, that changed.

There he saw prisoners wearing the ragged remains of striped uniforms and others who were naked. All of them were emaciated, “like the walking dead,” he said.

One man held out his hands, his fingers were webbed by overlapping scabs, he recalled. The crude barracks were crowded with prisoners who were near death, and piles of the bodies of those who had died.

A quarter-million people passed through the camp from July 1937 to August 1945, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. At least 55,000 people died there.

“Beaten, tortured, denied anything that makes life bearable,” Bass said. “I kept asking, ‘Who are these people, what have they done that was so terrible?’ ”

The inmates were a cross-section of the Nazis’ “undesirables” — including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and communists and other dissidents.

Bass, who had endured segregation and discrimination in the United States, knew he was seeing the result of where such extreme beliefs can lead.

“Now I had a reason to fight this war,” he said. “I saw what happens when we don’t stand up to evil. My blinders came off. I walked back to the gate and realized I was not the same anymore.”

After the war Bass, a native of Philadelphia, attended West Chester University in Pennsylvania through the G.I. Bill.

He wasn’t allowed to live in the dormitory or eat in the campus cafeteria, but his father urged him to set aside his anger and take advantage of the opportunity because it would allow him to do more good in the long run, Bass said.

He later earned his doctorate from Temple University and was an active participant in the civil rights movement, joining Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington.

After several years of teaching and working as a school administrator, Bass was named the first black principal of the hardscrabble Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia.

One day in 1972 he entered a classroom to investigate a commotion, and found students smoking cigarettes, their feet on their desks, largely ignoring an older woman who was a guest speaker.

The speaker was a survivor of Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, where an estimated 1.1 million people — mostly Jews — died in gas chambers, of starvation and the effects of illness, forced labor and medical experiments.

Furious at the students’ inattention and lack of respect, Bass ordered them to put out their cigarettes, sit up straight and listen because “I know what she’s trying to tell you is true, I was there. I saw it all.”

Afterward, the woman approached Bass and told him, “Young man, you have something to say.” Bass realized she was right.

He has told his story thousands of times since then. In 1981 he participated in the International Liberators Conference in Washington. In 1994 he was a keynote speaker at the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust. He is featured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II.”

When he speaks, he asks students to see how the lessons in history books apply to their lives. He also asks them to combat prejudice wherever they encounter it.

Though race relations in the United States have improved, “hate and intolerance are still with us,” Bass said. He is aware that time is running out for him to share his experiences. So many Holocaust survivors have since died, along with the soldiers who were witnesses to their suffering, he said.

“That’s why I keep doing this,” Bass said. “If they call and ask me to speak, I go. We all have a responsibility to do what we can do.”