Resident Recounts Time as American POW During WWII

Enthusiasm hit Seymour Fahrer, 89, when he saw the United States Army making their way towards him in Germany on that spring day in 1945.

“I was the first one to greet them,” Fahrer, who is now an East Meadow resident, explained when he saw the United States Army coming down the road to liberate him and a few dozen other American Prisoners of War (POW) from Nazi control after several months of imprisonment during World War II.

Fahrer was originally deployed to the Pacific Theater of WWII in 1943 with the U.S. Army, where he spent nine months on the Aleutian Islands. He returned home in 1944 and was then sent to England. He served as a medic at the 28th Field Hospital, which was eventually disbanded. Fahrer ended up in the 28th Division. He was captured by the Germans with his division on December 16, 1944 near the Luxembourg front.

He explained that the day before he was captured, he was on patrol and saw tanks in the woods. “I yelled to the sergeant up at front that the whole German Army was sitting out there in the woods…[The Germans] let us have it when I did that.”

He said his captain later called headquarters and the division was ordered to hold their position – not to retreat. The division had nothing to hold the Germans off with, since they were in a holding area. “We were sacrificed, I am sure the Army knew,” Fahrer said.

After their capture, he was put into a church with other POW soldiers. They were given a piece of bread and some jam, which Fahrer ate immediately due to his hunger. He wasn’t aware that this food was supposed to last him for five days. “We had no way of knowing,” he added.

They were then marched to a railroad yard, where Fahrer and his comrades were loaded into train freight cars. They traveled in these cars for five days into Germany, ending up in Bad Orb at POW camp Stalag 9B.

Fahrer began to serve as an interpreter for the Americans and Germans, but a few days later he was told he could no longer do that job because he was Jewish. “You couldn’t have a Jewish fellow being ahead of the rest of them because it [was] not right,” he said.

The Jewish American POWs were segregated about two weeks into their time at Stalag 9B. Soon after, they took all of the Jewish soldiers, and some non-Jewish soldiers, -- about 350 total -- and moved them into railroad freight cars for another five-day journey. They ended up in at Berga an der Elster, a satellite slave labor camp of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, located in Germany.

He said that when they were moved to Berga, “they started to lose men very fast.” Fahrer witnessed numerous atrocities at the camp, which was under the watch of the infamous Nazi Commander Erwin Metz. Nonetheless, he continued to do what he could to help his fellow American soldiers.

“They treated us very bad,” Fahrer said. “They didn’t feed us. You can see that we were skin and bones.”

Before liberation, the POWs were marched for miles as the Russian and American forces closed in on the camp. “When it came to that march, that march was really rough,” he added.

The United States Army liberated him during the spring of 1945, away from the main group of Berga POWs, with approximately 46 other men. After Fahrer was liberated, he spent two months in a hospital in France recovering.

According to CNN, “more than 100” American POWs died at Berga an der Elster and during the march.

Fahrer received the Bronze Star medal for his service, among other awards. He said that he has been applying for a Purple Heart for years, but hasn’t had any success.

“He was so active in helping other prisoners,” said Pearl, Fahrer’s wife of 66 years, of her husband receiving the Bronze Star. “…As a medic, he tried to help everybody.”

Fahrer and Pearl were engaged during the war and married after he arrived home. They have two children. “When he came home it was wonderful,” she added.

They lived in the Bronx and Forest Hills, eventually moving to East Meadow about 35 years ago. An active member of the , Fahrer has recently spoken about his experiences to young people at the temple.

“The younger generation, the war is too far away from them for them to picture or visualize what happened,” he said in regards to the importance of sharing his story with young people.