The backbone of our nation
Veterans are honored and thanked across Midlands; one event focuses on those who served in WWII
Roy Long gained fame as a Nebraska Cornhusker halfback in the early 1940s, but his frontline military service showed him a darker, grittier side of life.
The young infantry officer from Blair helped liberate the Gunskirchen Lager concentration camp in Austria with the 71st Infantry Division in the waning days of World War II.
The memory of thousands of dead and dying prisoners deep in the woods still affects Long, now 92. "It still boggles my mind: the sights, the sounds, the smells," he said.
The World War II veteran told his story to a hushed crowd of about 300 people at a special Veterans Day program Wednesday at the Strategic Air and Space Museum.
The museum event was one of a number of observances on a foggy and rainy Veterans Day. The bad weather pushed Omaha's Memorial Park observance indoors for the second consecutive year, to American Legion Post No. 1 near the Crossroads Mall. Veterans were presented with certificates at the Elk Ridge Village Retirement Center, while U.S. Strategic Command leader Adm. Cecil Haney spoke at Papillion-La Vista South High School.
The Strategic Air and Space Museum's mission is closely tied to the Cold War period. But Executive Director Mike McGinnis said the museum wanted to honor the generation that survived World War II and the Holocaust while witnesses are still here to tell their stories.
"These people in their lives were the backbone of our nation," McGinnis said. "They stood up for their country."
Long was an ROTC student when he set a national record with 258 rushing and passing yards in a 1942 game against Missouri, and his total of 55 pass and rushing attempts in that game would stand as a record into the 21st century.
He was drafted into the Army early the next year. He completed officer training in 1944 and landed in France that fall as the commander of a mortar squad from the 66th Infantry Regiment. His unit relieved a division that had been nearly obliterated in the Battle of the Bulge.
Long's unit braved mines called "Bouncing Bettys" — also known as "castrators" — that bounced waist-high before exploding.
"Those mines, they were bad news," Long said.
The 71st Division fought its way across Germany from northwest to southeast and came across Gunskirchen Lager on May 4, 1945, just a few days before Germany finally surrendered. About 15,000 prisoners, mostly Jews from Hungary, were dying of typhus, dysentery and starvation in the unheated barracks.
A single toilet served the entire camp, Long said. Even after liberation, dozens of patients died each night.
After Germany's defeat, Long was sent to Nuremberg to work as a prison guard at the trials of high-level Nazi officials, including Hermann Goering.
"We were close enough I could have shaken hands with him if I wanted," Long said. "But I didn't want to."
Long shared the stage Wednesday with Bea Karp of O'Neill, Nebraska, who told her harrowing tale of surviving a concentration camp in France.
Born in Lauterbach, Germany, in 1932, Karp vividly recalled Kristallnacht — the "Night of Broken Glass" — in 1938 when Nazi stormtroopers destroyed Jewish businesses and synagogues across Germany. Her father, a businessman, lost his business and disappeared for months afterward.
She told of her mother's horror the time she threw rocks at two Nazi soldiers on the street. And she recounted how she shattered a beloved porcelain doll that guards refused to allow her to take along when the family was deported to the Gurs concentration camp in October 1940.
On the train to the camp, guards took Jewish people who had disobeyed orders by hiding money. They were taken off the train and lined up on the platform.
"They shot all of the people," Karp said. "My mother took my face and put it in her lap. She didn't want me to see that."
Karp remembers extreme hunger during the family's stay at the camp. Her mother somehow arranged for Bea and her sister, three years younger, to be smuggled out of the camp by a Jewish resistance group. They lived in a home and later moved to a convent, where they spent the rest of the war. They moved to England and then to New York to live with relatives. After Karp married, she moved with her husband to Nebraska.
Through the Omaha Institute for Holocaust Education, Karp said she has told her story at least a thousand times over the years as a tribute to her parents, who were killed at Auschwitz but saved their daughters.
"I speak out because I don't want the Holocaust to be forgotten," she said. "I'm still fighting Hitler."
