Love Your Freedom? Thank a Vet

A tearful, joyous surprise

At his 80th birthday party, Holocaust survivor meets soldier who liberated him

By Peter Rowe
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

March 6, 2006

When Lou Dunst was a teenager, imprisoned in a series of Nazi concentration camps, he begged God: “Please let me live – if for nothing else than to tell my story.”

EARNIE GRAFTON / Union-Tribune Lou Dunst (right) hugged Bob Persinger, the man who liberated him and some 18,000 other prisoners more than 60 years ago from the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria.

Dunst did survive the war. He moved around Europe and Florida before settling in San Diego, where he prospered as a real estate investor. He's kept his end of the bargain, giving his Holocaust testimony many times in schools, churches, synagogues. This month, he is scheduled to address Harvard Law School.

His is a gripping tale, full of heartache and suspense. But the story always lacked a satisfactory ending.

Until yesterday. During a surprise birthday luncheon for Dunst in the ballroom of the Doubletree Hotel in Mission Valley, retired Superior Court Judge Norbert Ehrenfreund recounted the tale of Dunst's liberation to more than 170 family members and friends.

“The fact that Lou is here today, alive and well, celebrating his 80th birthday, is nothing short of a miracle,” Ehrenfreund said.

But the miracles didn't stop there.

Dunst collection U.S. soldiers and German POWs posed atop the "Lady Luck," the first tank to enter the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ehrenfreund said, “meet Bob Persinger, Lou's liberator.”

A gasp rose from the crowd as the silver-haired Persinger, now 82, walked to the stage and fell into Dunst's arms. “Thank you for saving our lives,” Dunst said between sobs. “God bless you!”

They had never met before yesterday, but their lives have been intertwined for more than 60 years. On May 6, 1945, lifelong bonds were forged between a Holocaust survivor and a tank commander – without either man's knowledge.

“I never saw him,” Persinger said.

“I was delirious,” Dunst said. “I didn't know what was happening.” That morning, in fact, Dunst was literally at death's door. A 19-year-old Ukrainian Jew in a Nazi concentration camp in Austria, he had crawled onto a pile of corpses outside the crematorium to perish. But that afternoon, Staff Sgt. Persinger drove his tank “Lucky Lady” through the camp's gates, liberating Dunst and the rest of Ebensee's 18,000 prisoners.

Persinger, then 21, had witnessed the terrors of combat at St. Lo and the Battle of the Bulge. But he had never seen anything like the nightmare of Ebensee, a notorious sub-camp of the massive Mauthausen facility.

Bob Persinger

Lou Dunst

Prisoners were covered in sores. Bodies were stacked – “like cordwood,” Persinger recalls – around the camp. The “kitchen” had no food, the “hospital” no medicine. Approaching the camp, the “Luck Lady's” crew was assaulted by the stench of death. Leaving the camp, the GIs removed their boots and burned them.

“I had seen men killed, some of them close buddies,” Persinger told more than 170 guests at Dunst's birthday luncheon. “But this was a different style of death.”

Yesterday's reunion capped an emotional surprise party for Dunst, whose actual birthday is Saturday. Estelle Dunst, who introduced herself as “Lou's pushy wife,” spent more than a year organizing the event with military efficiency. Many guests belong to the New Life Club, a San Diego outfit for Holocaust survivors that Lou Dunst serves as treasurer.

“I turned 80 last week and I'm the baby,” said Gussie Zaks, the club's president.

As the years pass and their numbers dwindle, there's increasing concern that these tales of inhumanity and survival are being lost. Many people want to ignore this unpleasant topic.

“Sometimes we hear people say, 'Enough with the Holocaust,' ” Zaks said. “No, never enough.”

Dunst collection As a prisoner at the Mauthausen concentration camp, Lou Dunst was forced to run up these steps to the camp's infamous rock quarry where the Nazis worked thousands of prisoners to death.

Dunst collection Lou Dunst prayed at a memorial outside the Mauthausen concentration camp during a 2003 visit to Austria. Ebensee was a satellite camp of the massive Mauthausen facility.

Persinger spent decades trying to forget the war. A year ago, though, the Austrian government invited him to attend the 60th commemoration of Ebensee's liberation. There, he was overwhelmed by the survivors' gratitude. One flew him to Beverly Hills for a reunion; another, to Sweden; this week, he'll meet still more survivors at Chapman University in Orange.

“I'm glad to do this,” he said yesterday. “We hope this will never be forgotten. Never again.”

But even the healthiest Holocaust survivors experience gaps in their memories, holes in their tales. For most of his life, Dunst did not know the names of his liberators, only that they were part of Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army.

In 2001, though, a Louisiana businessman and an Italian historian met on a train between Rome and Florence. Italo Tibaldi, the historian, was also a survivor of Ebensee. Talking to his new American friend, Timothy Anderson, Tibaldi bemoaned the fact that he had been unable to thank any of his saviors.

Anderson, who runs a physicians billing company in Lafayette, La., accepted the challenge and found the families of three Ebensee liberators. One of the men had died in Detroit. The second was living in New Jersey, but in the final stages of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.

The third? Bob Persinger of Loves Park, Ill., was alive and well and ready to help.

Two years ago, Anderson met Lou and Estelle Dunst at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Estelle, already planning her husband's 80th birthday party, contacted Bob and Arlene Persinger. The rest, as they say, is history.

For the Dunst family, history can be a sad topic. Lou's hometown began and ended the 20th century as a Ukrainian village. But in the 1940s, Jasina was taken over by Hungary, then by Nazi Germany and finally by the Soviet Union. In 1944, the village's Jewish population was forcibly removed from their homes and interned in a ghetto, then shipped to Auschwitz. Dunst's mother, Priva, was sent to her death by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazis' Angel of Death. His father, Marcus, died in another camp.

Incredibly, all three of the children – Lou; his brother, Irving; and his sister, Rusena – survived the war. The brothers were always imprisoned together, and Lou insists Irving risked his own life to ensure his brother's survival.

“When I talk to him about it, he says forget it, it's nothing,” Lou Dunst said. “Today it is nothing – then it was life.”

On May 6, 1945, it was Irving who directed the liberators to his brother's skeletal form and insisted the boy could be saved.

Bob Persinger doesn't remember this scene. He remembers half-dead prisoners singing and cheering, and the way he was whipsawed between elation and horror: “They were celebrating like you wouldn't believe, they were so happy. So were we, but on the other hand, we were crying.”

There were tears again yesterday, and again mixed emotions. Joy, yes, but also the sense that this lifelong bond involves a lifelong responsibility.

“Be healthy,” Irving Dunst told Persinger, “and be able to tell this to other people. Because, from you, they are more able to believe it.”