On a highway 50 miles from the Austrian border in 1945, American soldier Shigeru Nakamura and other members of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion were moving as a spearhead across Germany to overcome any Nazi resistance.
On May 2, just days before the war ended, they noticed thousands of people in striped uniforms wandering about, near death or lying in the snow.
Earlier, on April 27, the battalion had been part of the liberation of Dachau, the notorious concentration camp near Munich.
Now here were more former prisoners, part of a forced march until their German guards bolted in advance of the Americans.
“The Germans knew we were coming, so they abandoned the prisoners,” recalled Nakamura.
More than 70 years later, a photographic exhibit honoring these Japanese-Americans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team will take place at the Nisei Veterans Memorial Center in Kahului. The exhibit opens Tuesday and runs through Jan. 30.
For some 45 years after the liberation, the participation of Americans of Japanese ancestry in the liberation of Dachau remained unknown to the general public because the soldiers and their commanding officers were told not to discuss it, historian Eric Saul recalled.
Saul, curator of the exhibit and former curator of the Military Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco, said he was displaying a history of the 442nd Regiment in 1981 when some of the former 522nd Artillery soldiers mentioned Dachau.
“It wasn’t written anyplace,” he said, nor had he heard the accounts before.
Saul said when he made inquiries, officials at Dachau museum and the Holocaust Museum in Israel said the assertion was false.
But the artillery soldiers had taken photographs showing otherwise — including some with the Jewish prisoners.
Saul said his parents lived in Israel, and he put an article in an Israeli newspaper to publicize his request for survivors to step forward.
“I had many phone calls from Jewish survivors,” Saul said. “They said, ‘Absolutely, we were saved by them. We owe our lives to them.’”
Nakamura said the 522nd Artillery was the only battalion in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team that went into Germany, and had been reassigned to the 45th Infantry Division, part of the U.S. Seventh Army.
For two days after finding the Jewish prisoners, the American soldiers set up a field hospital and provided survivors with soft food such as powdered milk, eggs and pancakes because hard food would have made them choke. They hadn’t eaten in weeks.
Most of the prisoners were Lithuanian Jews who had been imprisoned since 1940, and thousands had died on the death march into the countryside, where they were being taken to be executed, Saul said.
Of the quarter-million Jews in Lithuania, an estimated 6,000 survived the Holocaust, and many of them were liberated by the Japanese-American unit.
Saul said the irony was that many Japanese-American soldiers from the U.S. mainland had come out of prison camps where they and their families had been confined as enemy aliens, including those born as U.S. citizens.
Nakamura, 94, a Waikapu resident, recalled losing his job as a laborer at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Although he was an American citizen, he was of Japanese ancestry, and the U.S. government initially treated him and other Japanese as aliens.
“At that time they treated us as second-class citizens,” said Nakamura, who volunteered to join the Army. “I got to prove to myself that I can fight for my country.”
