Surviving the Americans

This memoir by Hilliard, professor of mass communication at Emerson College in Boston, makes for haunting reading. In 1945, he was a U.S. Army private stationed with Eisenhower's forces in Germany. Himself a Jew, Hilliard was a horrified witness to the way concentration camp survivors were treated in camps now administered by U.S. troops and, with another private, wrote and distributed to Americans back home a document testifying to what he saw. According to the author, the survivors were subjected to anti-Semitism expressed by army officers as well as illness and starvation, because the rations and medicine allotted to them were stolen and sold on the black market. Hilliard also charges that former Nazis were permitted to head civilian governments and that they harassed Jewish refugees who came into their towns. Included are vivid descriptions of St. Ottilien, a hospital set up near Landsberg in Germany for survivors by survivors, where the only food available was smuggled in by sympathetic soldiers. Photos not seen by PW. (Dec.)