JACKSON - Every year when commemoration services for Holocaust victims roll around, Gilbert Metz is grateful to be alive. He puts the horror of Auschwitz and Dachau further behind him, no matter that his prisoner number remains tattooed on his arm.
But on this April 29 a Holocaust commemoration here was very special.
Fifty-eight years ago, April 29, 1945, 11 a.m., a gaunt, emaciated 16-year-old Gilbert Metz was liberated from the Nazis' dreaded concentration camp at Dachau.
More so, it was special because a Mississippi soldier had been one of his liberators.
Poignantly, the Mississippian who freed him exactly 58 years before came to stand up with Gilbert Metz at a Holocaust Memorial service at Temple Beth Israel.
Chester Burnham, now a leathery 85, came up from his home near the village of Puckett to share the moments of the touching service at Beth Israel, and receive the thanks of the Jackson Jewish community by having a tree in his honor planted in Israel.
He had been a corporal in the 932nd field artillery unit, a part of Patton's army. The Battle of the Bulge was only a few months behind them.
It was more or less accidental that Burnham volunteered on April 29, 1945, to take a Jeep driver to check out the Dachau camp, some 10 miles away from where his unit was bivouacked. He had no idea of the unspeakable horror he would find inside.
Two or three Nazi soldiers near the camp gate "high-tailed it when they saw us coming," says Burnham, and "I went inside. What I saw just tore me up. Dead bodies were stacked up all over the place. And a few, I could see, were still alive … just skin and bones."
Amazingly, Gilbert Metz was one of those alive, and Burnham remembers taking down his name. "And the look on his face I will never forget," he adds.
In later years through newspaper articles when Burnham learned about Metz now living in Mississippi, "that name, because of the New York Mets, came back to me." And that was when the two hooked up by telephone.
Burnham said after his shocking discovery inside Dachau, he took notes on what he saw. "I could do nothing other than head back to my unit, report my findings so that a team of medics could go back and take over." As it was, it took several days longer for the camp and the survivors to be decontaminated before they could be removed.
Gilbert Metz's life is a complicated journey beginning from childhood in French Alsace-Lorraine before it was overrun by the Nazis in 1940 and all Jews had to flee for their lives.
Metz's family wound up in the French town of St. Die with Gilbert and his sister for three years, poetically, attending a Roman Catholic school before the family along with all other Jews in town were arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo and shipped off to concentration camps.
Shuffled from one death camp to another, somehow he stayed alive, losing his mother and father to the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz along the way. What happened to his sister, four years younger than he, the Lord only knows.
You've got to ask him: How did you survive?
"I was just lucky," says the 74-year-old Metz. Even once taken for dead, his fellow prisoners in their typhus-ravaged barracks stripped him naked and tossed him out in the snow.
No doubt he had to be clever. He used his small size to advantage. And what served him in good stead was that he could speak High German, an asset that Prussian officers respected.
"If I hadn't spoken High German as well as I did, I don't think I would have survived," he says.
Water. Above all, Metz learned, you couldn't live without it, even more so than food. Without water you could go insane. You would fight for it. Even die for it.
Metz recalls that dozens of thirst-maddened Jews packed into a railroad cattle car were dumped into the yard of one Nazi prison camp. They desperately rushed to a fountain on the camp ground to devour precious water.
From guard towers, Nazi riflemen opened fire. Dozens of prisoners fell dead.
Metz somehow escaped being hit. Early the next morning when he peeked out of his barracks, he spotted 100 bodies strewn around the fountain.
His parents both dead, after World War II he was allowed to come live with an aunt in Natchez who long ago had emigrated to the U.S.
Metz graduated from Natchez High, went on to Tulane University, but was drafted into the U.S. military during the Korean War and sent to Korea. Again he survived.
Rather than finish in law at Tulane as he planned, Metz came back to Mississippi, moved to Jackson and launched his own business as a women's apparel and dry goods wholesaler, selling to smaller independent stores.
He built up a $250,000 business over 25 years until his wife's health began to fail badly. Two years ago he retired.
Now Metz is fighting a life-and-death battle completely different than surviving the Holocaust: prostate cancer.
A few months ago, his prognosis to survive this battle looked less than promising.
But now a super-expensive medicine that comes, ironically, from Germany has given him new hope to hang around for awhile. Once a month, a dose costs $575.
