Wanda Nordlie''s hospital unit was assigned to care for prisoners in a liberated Nazi concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria. The harsh conditions of the camp stood in stark contrast to the beauty of the Austrian Alps behind it.
More than 60 years after Wanda Nordlie returned from her service as an Army nurse during World War II, she can recall the horrible conditions of the liberated Nazi concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria, where she cared for the malnourished prisoners.
"It was a long time ago, but you never forget stuff like that," said Nordlie, who's 91 and lives with her husband, Don, in Litchfield.
Nordlie, then in her early 20s, served with the 139th Evacuation Hospital. She was among 40 nurses, 40 doctors and 200 enlisted men, who cared for thousands of men who had been Nazi prisoners.
The 139th Evacuation Hospital arrived about one week after the American troops liberated the camp on May 6, 1945. Before the Americans arrived, the mortality rate among prisoners averaged about 400 per day. About two weeks after the 139th Evacuation Hospital arrived, the mortality rate was reduced to about 15 per day, she said.
The 139th was sent to restore some semblance of humanity amid the filth, starvation and stench in one of the worst concentration camps other than Auschwitz, she said.
About 3,000 men needed hospitalization, while about 15,000 more required care but did not need to be hospitalized, she said. Early on, servicemen and women worked 12-hour days. Medical personnel administered plasma on an assembly line scale, she said, while tending to the prisoners' medical needs. Others with the 139th cleaned up human feces that covered the floors, beds and blankets, which also were insect and lice infested.
Nordlie, along with each of the nurses, was given one tent of 60 men to care for during their two-month stay at the camp.
"I don't think anybody weighed over 65 pounds, and these were full-grown men. There were some that had wounds. Some of them had broken bones. Most were malnourished," said Nordlie, who described the men as human skeletons that were still alive. "We fed them the best we could when we got there."
After the camp was liberated, some Nazi troops hid in the mountains and returned to the camp to steal food. The Army gave guns to some nurses for protection. However, Nordlie never encountered much trouble.
"I was a little scared once," she admitted cautiously. "I didn't tell anybody about this until a couple of years ago because it was so awful. I was on my ward with 60 patients in a tent. I went outside to take a breath of air, and here I saw two Nazis. They had these gorgeous uniforms, so we always knew them, and they were maybe 40, 50 feet away from me. They had a man, and I realized they were killing him. And there was nobody I could say, 'Come and help.' I wanted to do something, and I thought, if I go (help), they'll take me on next. They were heartless. So, I went back in my tent. I've always felt bad about it, but there really wasn't anything I could do."
Despite all that she and the other nurses experienced, "None of us, at least not in public, ever shed a tear. Nurses have a way of doing that. There wasn't room for tears. It's hard to understand. We laughed and giggled like girls do. I think you kind of cover up with foolishness. It helps to have a sense of humor," she said.
For her, the tears didn't come until much later. "The crazy thing is, I used to cry over it, but not until after I had been in the service. You just took those things in stride," she said.
Nurses' training
Nordlie, who was Wanda Thoen at the time because she didn't marry until after the war, enrolled in a nursing program at Fairview Hospital in Minneapolis after graduating from Litchfield High School in 1941.
For Nordlie, nursing school was a cheaper option than college for her family.
"It was during The Depression, and we didn't have much money. I could go through four years of nursing for $200," she said.
She borrowed money from her mother and moved to Minneapolis.
"You worked eight hours and went to school full time," she said. "It was good training. I was able to pay my mother back after the first year."
As nurses' training ended at home, World War II waged on overseas.
Nordlie and her close friend, Louise Olson of Grantsburg, Wis., who passed away last year, were among a group of five friends who enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps together after graduating from nursing school.
"She and I, we both signed up at once. When we signed up, they asked us, 'Would you like to stay in the service together all the time?' I said, 'Can you do that?' (They said,) 'Yes, we call it the buddy system for women,'" she recalled. "They thought it was better if we had a friend if we were going hither and yon. I think women were thought of as the weaker sex in those days."
As promised, the Army kept Nordlie and Olson together throughout their time in service, "Which was really wonderful," she said.
The Army offered an excitement for this Minnesota farm girl who had never left the state. Once she was called to duty, she traveled to military bases across the country.
"We didn't stay long in one place," she said. "They kept moving us. We went to various Army posts just to help and to learn. We had classes all the time."
The training Nordlie received was to prepare her for the Japanese campaign. She became part of the 139th Evacuation Hospital unit, similar to the hospital unit featured on the TV show, "M*A*S*H." They were trained to catch casualties right off the front line, and then fix up soldiers so they could move to the hospital, said Nordlie's husband, Don. "But they couldn't catch up to the war because it was moving so fast."
Nevertheless, her hospital unit boarded a ship and headed toward the war. "We landed at Le Havre, France. We were only there a couple of weeks and took care of anybody who came around," she said.
"I have one experience that really haunts me. I had to go down to the main desk at the hospital. There was a very good-looking, young man who just walked in, and he said that his plane had gone down. He said, 'I'm fine. I just walked out of it.' He stood there and was signing in, and he dropped dead. That was just a horrendous moment. He was admitting himself because he figured something must be wrong with him. I presume he had internal injuries that led him to death. It was traumatic because we hadn't been in the service very long and to have somebody die right in front of you," she said.
More trauma and horrific images were yet to come, though, as the 139th Evacuation Hospital unit left France and headed to Austria.
Caring for prisoners
After American troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp in Ebensee, they needed servicemen and women to care for the prisoners. The 139th Evacuation Hospital unit arrived and went to work.
The beauty of Ebensee, which was a little summer resort town in the midst of the Austrian Alps along the shores of an emerald-green lake, stood in stark contrast to the horrific conditions inside the gates of Ebensee Concentration Camp.
"The lakes were so gorgeous and clean. The mountains were beautiful," Nordlie recalled. However, the condition of the camp and the prisoners, "was just horrendous, just terrible."
The prisoners, now patients, were from neighboring countries, including Poland, France and Russia.
"Fortunately, I took German in high school, so I could communicate to some extent," she said.
The men weighed 65 pounds at the most when she arrived. "We got them up to 80, 90 pounds," she said. As they grew stronger, they returned to their hometowns.
She did whatever she could to care for the men in her ward, including standing up to a high-ranking official.
"This huge Russian officer came in and wanted to look my patients over. He didn't tell me why he wanted to see them, but a lot of people came to visit," she said. He looked at each patient and would point to certain ones, saying "this one."
He told her he intended to bring them back to Russia with him because they were all Russians.
"I looked at him and said, 'I'm not aware of that, but we will go and speak to every one of them. I went to the guys and in my broken German, I said, 'Are you Russian?' And their eyes would get just huge. They were so scared," she recalled, and one by one, each man told her he was not Russian. "They were so afraid. It was so sad."
Russia had lost many men in the war, and the officer was looking for more men to serve, Nordlie said. She knew the prisoners were in no condition to leave the camp much less go into battle. So, Nordlie told the officer that the men he had pointed out were not Russian.
"This big Russian (officer) got so angry ... He said, 'You are wrong, and I'm going to take these men.' I said, 'You are not. I am in charge.' He was a big guy from Russia and, of course, I was second lieutenant, that's as low as you could get (in rank) and still be a nurse," said Nordlie, who refused to back down. "I said, 'I am in charge of this ward and nobody outranks me in my ward.'"
The officer had a chest full of medals on his uniform, Nordlie recalled, and after she refused to release the men, "He got so mad and jumped up and down. All those medals went tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. I got the giggles and that made him madder than ever."
The officer talked to the head nurse, who told him that Nordlie was in charge. "He couldn't understand that, the minor officer I was, and half his age," she said. However, the officer left without the men.
"I have never felt so important in my life to scare off a Russian. I was so happy because I really thought he could kill me, he was that big," Nordlie said.
After weeks of continuous care, the prisoners' conditions improved. The 139th Evacuation Hospital left the camp and boarded ship to care for American casualties in Japan.
"The bomb dropped just as we were leaving for Japan. When we got past the Rock of Gibraltar, the war was declared over," she said. The ship turned and headed to Boston instead.
After she was discharged, Nordlie almost re-enlisted because she loved the work, even though caring for men in a concentration camp was not what the nurses expected they would do.
"We thought we were going to take care of our men, and we didn't take care of one of our men," she said. Yet, "We felt good about it. We did what we could and loved every bit of it."
Returning home
Nordlie returned home from the service in the spring of 1946.
Even though Don and Wanda had graduated together from Litchfield High School, they had never dated. After graduation, he served as a sergeant in the Marines during World War II and landed on Iwo Jima about two hours after the initial forces landed in February 1945. He returned home in December of that year, and went to work at Litchfield State Bank.
Don recalled how he and Wanda reunited.
"In March 1946, she just got home after leaving the service and she got a mysterious letter from an agency called the IRS. She had never heard of income tax," Don said, and the April deadline for filing taxes was looming.
Wanda laughed at the recollection. "I don't think my folks ever had enough money to have to pay it (income tax), so my father didn't know what I should do. He said, 'Go down to the bank. There are people down there who can help you.' I walked in and there was Don," she said.
After helping his former classmate with her taxes, Don felt a connection to Wanda. "She had been in the service, and I had been in the service, and it was interesting getting the stories together," he said.
They started dating, and "That was the best thing that happened to me," she said.
Once back from the service, Wanda took classes at St. Olaf College, "because we got as many months free (in tuition) as we put into the service. I had always wanted to go to St. Olaf, but it was an expensive college. I loved every minute of it."
She had worked on the student newspaper while at Litchfield High School and wrote constantly. "Oh, I loved writing. I liked nursing, but I really wanted to write," she said.
Her St. Olaf English teacher knew she couldn't afford college, so he told her if she returned, he would see to it that she received a full scholarship for her remaining three years.
"However, Don was in the picture then, and I thought, 'I don't think he'd wait for me for three years,' and I wasn't going to lose Don. I decided rather quickly I wouldn't continue my education. I'd get married instead. I never regretted it," she said. "I went into nursing (initially) because that's all the money I had. It was the best thing I ever did."
She and Don were married in 1947, and she went to work as a nurse at Litchfield Hospital. The Nordlies soon adopted two sons, Ryan, now 60, who currently lives in Hutchinson, and Dan who has since passed away.
The Nordlies moved around Minnesota, living in Albert Lea, New Prague, South St. Paul and Cottage Grove as Don worked in various banking jobs. Ultimately, they returned to Litchfield to enjoy retirement.
"Really, we are so fortunate to have had this life because there's been so many good, mostly good, things. We've had a very good life," Wanda said.
A part of history
Some of her experiences at Ebensee are included in the book, "Inside the Gates," by Dr. Richard Macdonald. The author wrote the book mainly about the role played by his father, Lt. Col. Hugh Macdonald, M.D., in liberating the Nazi concentration camp in Ebensee. However, he devoted a chapter to her.
"That started a long friendship," Don said. "It's been very interesting."
May 6, 2015, will mark the 70th anniversary of the opening of the gates to Ebensee Concentration Camp. After Macdonald's book was released in 2010, a former prisoner of the camp who was 16 at the time, along with Nordlie and others met to promote the sale of the book. The former prisoner is a successful businessman and has offered to pay for the Nordlies and several others to travel to Ebensee in May. The Nordlies are giving serious thought to his offer.
"I was so pleased that I got to go overseas," during the war, Wanda said, adding she would like to go back to see Ebensee again. "It would be pretty wonderful."