WITNESS

by Jo Dyer

 

 

This is a story that needed to be told.  It is Albert’s recollections of the time he spent in the US Army from February 1944 through July 1946, in the ETO.  He shared his story with me during several meetings in April and May 2009.

 

I first met Albert Spector when he spoke to my Holocaust class at school.  A friend arranged for his visit, and, as I listened to his story, I was stunned that this kindly gentleman had such an amazing tale to tell.  My siblings and I had gone to school with his children, and I even taught and coached his youngest during my first year of teaching.  I knew him as a successful businessman and a member of that group collectively known as “parents”.

 

That was about all I knew of Albert until he spoke to my class about his WWII experience.  Who would have guessed the story he had to tell?

 

After completing his military service in World War II, Albert returned to the little Amish community of Mt. Eaton, Ohio, where he worked in his father’s retail store, eventually running it himself.  He became a successful businessman, married in 1949, and had four children.  He moved to Wooster, Ohio, where he became a pillar of the community.  He never spoke to anyone of his wartime experiences – not to his buddies, his colleagues, his parents, or his wife.  “Everybody wanted to forget the war.”

 

“I never talked about what I did until my kids started asking about it – after they were teenagers, and that was the first I’d decided I should talk about it.  That’s about the time they started [saying that] there would be a time when nobody remembered what happened over there, and that’s why I give these talks [to school children] when I can.”

 

This is Albert Spector’s story.

 

                                                                                                                   * * *

 

A Soldier and a Medic

 

In February 1944, nineteen-year-old Albert received notice that he would be called up in April.  He was languishing in his second semester at Fenn College in Cleveland, OH.  One of only four men in a campus fraternity house, he found he excelled in the social aspect of college more than the academic.  He decided he was ready to take up the government’s offer and showed up at the recruiting station later that same month.  He presented his papers to the Marine representative at the first table.  The recruiter shook his head and passed the papers on to the Navy.  He too shook his head and passed Albert’s papers on to the last station – the Army.  Looking over the papers, the Army said, “Hmmm, have limited use of your left hand.”

 

“Yes sir.”

 

“You’ve got a flat foot.”

 

Yes sir.”

 

“You’re quite a bit overweight, too.”

 

“Yes sir.”

 

“We’re gonna make a helluva good soldier out of you!”

 

“Yes sir.”

 

Albert was in the Army!  He reported to Ft. Hayes in Columbus, Ohio, where he immediately contracted measles.  “There were always measles in the Army.”  Following his hospitalization, he reported to Camp Haun, California, for basic training.

 

“As we got done with basic, they’d have little groups together and decide what branch you’d go to.  They were picking different ones for different branches, and when they got to me, they said, ‘how would you like to be in the medical corps?’  I said that’s all right with me…  I had no idea what it was going to be.  I could have been infantry, artillery, armored corps, or even the air corps…”

 

Many wanted the air corps; few were selected.  Albert had no background in the medical area.  He was told, “We’ll probably ship you to an outfit that needs a medic and you’ll get your on-the-job training there from the doctor in the detachment you’ll be assigned to.”  He was assigned to an artillery detachment, and the unit then moved to Camp Carson, Colorado, for artillery and medic training.

 

Albert was part of a group of nine medics assigned to a doctor who was to be their trainer.  Based on his experience as a student and a retail clerk, he was promoted and assigned as the detachment supply corporal but was required to train as a medic, which “didn’t amount to too much!”  Because they were such a small detachment, the job did not require much training, as they did not have many supplies.  The training was whatever the doctor thought they needed to know.  They first learned to give shots:  morphine, inoculations, and penicillin when it became available at the end of the war.  He also learned to stitch wounds.  They practiced their needlework on a hunk of beef, which they sliced open and then stitched closed.  However, the only time he ever actually stitched a wound was when, at Camp Carson, he had to put a stitch in a lacerated eyeball.  “To this day, I shake when I think about that.  I can’t believe I did it!  I musta done okay – he didn’t go blind!”  The medics also were trained to start IVs.  While at Camp Carson, he spent three weeks working in a real emergency room at a Denver hospital, staffing shifts in the ER and then taking classes to further his training.  That, by the way, was the only place during the whole of his service that he saw nurses!

 

At Camp Carson, the medics served time in camp sick-call every day and saw anyone with complaints.  “Most of the complaints were minor things.  I usually told them to take two aspirin and get a good night’s rest.”  The medics received medical bags already packed with field supplies:  morphine, aspirin, antiseptic powder (sulfa), smelling salts, halazone tablets, and bandage compresses.

 

From Camp Carson, the unit went to Fort Hunter Liggett in California for mountain training, camping in pup tents.  Albert recalls that he trained for lots of emergencies, but in actuality, his job in combat was mostly dressing wounds.  He treated more injuries during training than in combat, but, of course, the combat wounds were more serious.  The first casualty he saw and treated was on maneuvers in California, right beside the aid station.  The artillery unit had been on the firing range practicing with 50mm machine guns.  They returned to camp and one soldier was unloading the gun, holding it against his thigh, when another soldier accidentally hit the butterfly trigger and discharged the gun.  It tore all the flesh off the inside of his thigh right to the bone and he was hemorrhaging badly.  His sergeant used his hands to find the artery and the medics quickly were at his aid.  Screaming the whole time, the soldier was transported to the hospital, where he died 15 minutes later, crying for his mother.

 

One of the worst things Albert recalls was the accidental death of three soldiers while on maneuvers in California.  Camped in tents in the open while there, men would routinely throw their bedrolls under machinery and tanks to sleep in the open.  One evening three men slept under a tank.  Through the night, the soft ground settled, eventually pinning the men under the tank.  All efforts to move the tank were futile and the three men were eventually crushed to death while the medics and their buddies stood helplessly by as witnesses.  “We could not move that tank.  It was just horrible.” 

 

After a few more moves to various training camps in California and North Carolina, Albert and his Division Artillery Medical Unit of nine medics and one physician, 89th Infantry, shipped out of Boston in December of 1944.  They landed in France and were immediately moved to the front and into the “Battle of the Bulge.”  His job was to stay with the artillery aid station and treat any soldier with any problem they presented.  Front line soldiers were carried back to the aid station where they were stabilized so they could be moved on back to the field hospital.  He treated more gunshot than shrapnel wounds, and most of his work was dressing wounds.  Very few wounded walked to the aid station; most were carried.  Albert explained that each unit had a band and when the unit was in combat, the band members served as stretcher-bearers.  He explained that they never carried plasma or blood as they had no way to keep it refrigerated.  The most they could do was start IVs with something like saline solution.  “We patched them up the best we could then sent them back [to the field hospital behind the lines].”

 

He sometimes would move up with gun emplacements.  These were past the artillery but not past the infantry.  Sometimes he ended up at the front.  “It was often difficult to determine just where the front line was – there were German soldiers all around them in the woods… we always said as medics we were the targets… we wore the big red crosses… something to aim at!”

 

When they would move into French and German villages, they usually tried to set up the aid station in the town bathhouse.  Albert explained that small villages did not have indoor plumbing and therefore no showers.  The villagers would bathe in the town bathhouse.  The medical corps would set up there and treat American soldiers and sometimes emergencies of the townspeople.  In one small German village, they even delivered a baby!

 

Albert did not have occasion to treat much shell shock, but did see some cases.  They suffered from being in combat, not from continual shelling.  He does recall one time they were strafed and he saw bombs falling.  One bomb fell right into a foxhole and killed the man inside.  He went to help, but found there were no pieces larger than his hand.  “They called in a special group to go through there to pick up the parts of his body to be buried.”  That was the worst combat injury he witnessed.

 

He also recalls the worst case of shell shock was during training, again in Louisiana.  The medical officer “went completely off his rocker.  He got violent with some soldiers and then he got very melancholy and all he’d do was sit and cry.  We had to put him in a pup tent with guards until he could be removed from the camp.”

 

He does remember marching through the night on many occasions, but once they arrived at the destination, they could doze off.  Since the artillery didn’t take night maneuvers, sleep deprivation was not a big problem.  The artillery did not fire everyday, but when it did fire, nobody got any sleep.

 

“I didn’t know enough to cover my ears or I could have probably saved my hearing.  They didn’t even tell the guys working the guns either.  Most of them lost their hearing.  Where I think I lost mine was in training in Louisiana as I was out with the battery and I was right next to the guns all the time.  My hearing came back pretty decent until I was thirty-five years old.  That’s when it started degrading.”

 

He wears hearing aids today.

 

Asked if he learned to smoke while in the ETO, Albert chuckled and explained that he did smoke a pipe while in college.  However, on the ship to Europe, he smoked a pipe and became deathly seasick.  Blaming it on the pipe, he threw it overboard and never smoked again.  He was the only person in the detachment who did not smoke.  He did trade his cigarette rations for items he wanted, once trading a carton of cigarettes for the German Luger he brought home as a souvenir.

 

In Europe, military units were placed in groups of three.  These three divisions were rotated to the front with one always in the rear in reserve.  While in reserve, depending on the situation they had from ten days to two weeks to relax, clean their equipment, and get ready to return to the front.  He recalls that nobody ever talked about what they saw or what they did in combat.  He usually hung out with his medic buddies.  If they were lucky enough to be in reserve in town with a bathhouse, then they got showers.  His unit was instructed to always carry an extra pair of clean underwear and socks in his pack.  As for his uniform, he washed it in the only laundry tub available:  his helmet.

 

He explained that as a medic, they had nothing to do with the dead bodies.  The Graves Registration team followed the front line units about a day or two behind and collected the bodies.  He explained that if the soldier was injured or killed by a blast, their boots were usually blown off and so they just would tag the toe on the right foot.

 

A Liberator

 

A very famous picture of three generals at Ohrdruf labor camp spans the entire wall on the fourth floor of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, greeting visitors as they exit the elevator to start the museum tour.  During the war, Albert stood right beside the photographer who took that picture.  Years later, when he visited the museum and got off that elevator, he was taken aback and shaken when he viewed that picture.  It was a flashback to a very awful experience in April, 1945.

 

Ohrdruf-Nord was opened in November of 1944 as a sub-camp of Buchenwald.  It was a forced-labor camp established to supply workers to build an underground bunker to house a new Fuhrer HQ for Hitler.  It was to accommodate an underground train station so Hitler could travel there by train from Berlin and go directly underground to the new HQ.  Slave labor was also provided to local Ohrdruf industry.  Also in the area was a vast Nazi communication center and salt mines where the Nazis hid works of art and gold bullion, worth over $250 million.  The camp held 12,000 prisoners in mid-March 1945.  The Nazis marched 9,000 prisoners back to Buchenwald only days before the American liberation, leaving 800 sick behind, too weak to walk.  These are the survivors the Americans liberated.*

 

After the Bulge, Albert’s unit moved on into Germany in a southeastern direction, and by April 4, 1945, they had reached and set up camp in the German town of Ohrdruf.  Ohrdruf held roughly 12,000 people and was thirty-two miles southwest of Weimar in southwestern Germany.  Soon each detachment in the area was called to send a couple medics into the camp.

 

“They didn’t say what for or why.  We had no idea what we were going in for… the only camp the Americans had come across was in France and it had been [abandoned] years before, but they knew it had been a camp where they held prisoners.  This was the first camp the American Army had come across where they had live Jewish prisoners… they said there were a few Gypsies in there but I didn’t see them.  It was mostly Jewish prisoners there.”

 

When he arrived at the fenced-in camp and walked through the gate, his eyes beheld a hell that still defies understanding sixty-four years later.  He had walked into the German labor camp called Ohrdruf.  It had been liberated by American soldiers of the 354th Infantry Regiment of the 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Divisions, and was the first concentration camp the Americans liberated.

 

“The first thing I saw when we walked in – it was what would be known as the parade ground – it was just littered with dead bodies.  There must have been… it would be hard to guess how many… but probably between 75 – 100 dead bodies just lying around… some had striped outfits and some were nude.  I walked in there and I was just overwhelmed.  Then a medical officer came up to us… and he said, ‘I want you to go around here and see to it that none of the GIs give food to these survivors.  These people cannot take solid food – it will kill them.’  He told us we were going to feel very, very sorry for some of these people, but we have to do it for their own good.  Some of the soldiers couldn’t understand it, and I tried to explain to them why and it finally got across to them.”

 

Albert observed some of the inmates wandering around the camp, starting to gather into small groups.  As he passed one of the groups, he heard them speaking Yiddish.  Having grown up in a home with a grandparent from Russia who spoke only Yiddish, Albert had picked up some of the language.  He walked up to one group and said in Yiddish, “I’m Jewish too.”

 

“They just fell all over me.  They called everyone over and they just fell all over me.  They couldn’t imagine I was a Jewish soldier in the American Army, and I told them, ‘yes, I was.  You’ll find there’s a lot of them,’ but they just couldn’t get over it, and I didn’t know what to tell them or what to say to them.  And the group kept getting bigger and bigger.  The just kept talking about the fact that I was Jewish and in the American Army.”

 

When asked if he wore anything that identified him as Jewish, Albert answered,

 

“Actually, up to that time I’d never been very Jewish.  In Youngstown [where he lived the first thirteen years of his life] I learned to speak Yiddish because my grandfather lived with us and didn’t speak English, and that’s why I learned to speak Yiddish.  But up to that time, other than being Bar Mitzvahed, I wasn’t much of a Jew… [this camp experience] affected me in that I decided I would never deny my Judaism any longer, and before that a lot of young men denied their Judaism – but I never did again.”

 

It may be confusing to some that generations could deny their Judaism, but years of repression and cruelty weaves its way into the collective consciousness.

 

“I had heard talk about the fact that the Jews were being exterminated.  I heard that in Youngstown [Ohio] in the mid-1930s.  My dad and some of his cronies [he was an immigrant from Russia, coming here in 1914] talked about it.  These men used to come over on Sunday morning and have herring and beer, and they got to talking about what was happening in Europe – they knew from letters and newspapers, and there were a few survivors that got to this country and gave lectures about their experiences.  I remember thinking, ‘how can it be – how can they just be taking people off the streets?’  Then they got to show some pictures about what was happening, and I got the feeling there was something really happening, but I couldn’t visualize it really.  His generation kept more up on what was happening in Europe.  My father and his friends believed the stories, but they more or less felt ‘what can we do?’”

 

They had reason to believe the horror stories.  Their families had lived through, and died in, the anti-Semitic hatred and violence that marked the history of Eastern Europe for centuries.

 

“My grandmother was killed in a pogrom in the Odessa area, and I guess it was a horrible thing.  My mother and her sister had taken off into the woods to hide out there for a day or two until after the pogrom.  They went back and found their mother and sister had been killed.  My Uncle Isadore (my mother’s nine year old brother) had hidden somewhere in the house and his mother and sister were raped and killed… where he could see.  They had tied my grandfather up and made him watch.  That’s when they picked up and left [Russia] and made their way to the US.  They ended up in Youngstown, Ohio, where my grandfather then lived with us.  My grandfather, Emmanuel, was in his late 40s or early 50s when he arrived here.  He was my babysitter when I was five and six years old.  He didn’t speak English and that’s where I learned my Yiddish.  My grandfather died when I was twelve years old.  He had become a rag peddler, walking the streets calling, ‘Any old rags, any old scrap,’ buying and then selling it to the scrap yards.  He did that for some years, but his mind was gone.  He just never recovered from that pogrom… never again.  My family never, ever talked about that.  It wasn’t until my 65th birthday celebration and we were all together that my uncle [Isadore] broke down and shared this story.  We all sat there, just stunned.  All that time… he kept that to himself, and my mother never said anything either.

 

“My father’s family never talked about their experiences in Europe either.  I have a cousin, now ninety-six year old, in Philadelphia, and I thought surely she had more information than I did, but she said no, her parents were the same as my parents… they did not tell her a thing about their experiences in Europe.”

 

Albert does know that his paternal grandfather was a kosher butcher in a Kiev shtetl, and he is named in remembrance of him.  His paternal grandmother followed Albert’s father, a sister, and his brother to the US.  His father, Michael, worked in the Stetson hat factory in Philadelphia, but grew to hate the indoor job.  He eventually moved to Youngstown when friends from Kiev, now living in Youngstown, arranged a job for him as a peddler, the outside job he relished.

 

“By the 1940s, he [Albert’s father] had lost complete track of his family remaining in Kiev.  He never did find out what happened to them, and he never did try [to find out].  On my last trip to Yad Vashem in Israel, I saw the name of their shtetl on the list of those destroyed as the Nazis invaded Russia.  Babi Yar is in that region and it’s possible they were killed and buried in that mass murder.

 

“In Europe, my father was forced to go to Hebrew school for eight to ten hours a day.  Once here, he gave up the idea of religion and became agnostic, glad to escape the oppression of Hebrew school.  They drummed and beat it into you.  All three siblings felt the same.  My father had a ‘hands off’ attitude about religion when I was growing up, while my mother was a practicing Jew.  I didn’t really get involved in my faith until I married and we moved to Wooster where there were thirty-five to forty other Jewish families in the community.”

 

At Ohrdruf, the soldiers were ordered to leave all bodies where they lay, and the medics began to treat the living.  Working in the camp yards, Albert started IVs, got them on litters, and then loaded them in the ambulances that removed them to the field hospital.  They did not diagnose, just stabilized them and sent them back.  Albert worked six hours on, six hours off, around the clock for a week or so.  The smell of the place sickened him then and haunts him today.  It is something that he can never forget.  It even overwhelmed them in their bivouac area outside the camp in a grove of trees.

 

Some of the survivors were too ill to move from their barracks, so they were treated there and then transported.  All told, more than 800 survivors were treated and moved back to the field hospital, and eventually the worst were moved back to the hospital in Paris.  Many of the survivors left the field hospital and began to make their own way home.  Following this initial camp liberation, the US Army medical corps was quickly overwhelmed as more and more camps were discovered.  Eventually the Army organized separate units that would go into the camps they liberated and set up treatment facilities right in the camp itself.  Albert’s unit had been in reserve when he was summoned to help at Ohrdruf.  In eight days or so, the unit moved to the front and stopped at the camp to pick him up.  After Ohrdruf, his unit came across other camps, but he was not involved in their liberation or treatment.  Albert never had any further contact with any of the survivors he treated or met in Ohrdruf.

 

What he witnessed during that week makes Albert a witness to history, a witness to what some today deny ever happened.  But he did see it.  He witnessed several sheds around the camp with bodies stacked like cordwood inside, some lightly sprinkled with lime.  He witnessed mass graves where the Nazis buried the thousands of deaths in the camp.  Albert witnessed the burning pits on top of railroad irons, used in attempts to hide evidence of their genocidal crimes.  He witnessed the crowded barracks with bunks four-high and packed so close it was difficult to move.  He saw the threadbare blankets given to the inmates.  He listened to prisoner stories about…

 

“…being marched into town everyday, and they worked, and they had very little food.  They would get a bowl of gruel in the morning, were marched into town, worked for 12 hours, came back, no food, and then the next morning they’d get up at dawn, same thing… they worked them until they dropped dead.”

 

Albert, as already mentioned, also witnessed the visit to Ohrdruf of Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton on April 12, 1945.  “That was quite something to see – three generals together.”  He was close enough to hear everything they said, but…

 

“…they really didn’t talk too much.  Eisenhower gave an opening speech and said he had heard about these things, but he had never seen anything like it before in his life, and the American Army would look into what was going on.  [He warned that] it will be worse as we move farther into Germany.  He talked for just a few minutes.  Patton didn’t say anything.  Eisenhower told us we were not to move a body until the pictures were taken.  He wanted to document what they found there.”

 

Prophetically, General Eisenhower wrote of his experience:  “I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that ‘the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’  Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal.  I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures.  I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.” **

 

Before Eisenhower arrived at the camp, the local burgomaster (mayor) and his wife, as well as all the townspeople, were brought into the camp to look at what was there.  They were all aghast at what they saw and all denied any knowledge of the place.  “This couldn’t happen in Germany,” they all said.

 

“I never found a German that was a Nazi, according to them.  I never found one that thought Hitler was a great man.  I never found one that wanted to go to war against the US.  They all [said] ‘No, no, we didn’t like it.’  The whole town of Ohrdruf, including the mayor, the burgomaster, swore they didn’t know there was a camp there in their city.  Well, that’s baloney.  They couldn’t help but know because they marched detachments into the town every morning to work in the factories there.”

 

That night the burgomaster and his wife committed suicide by hanging themselves.

 

While at Ohrdruf, Albert also witnessed convoy after convoy of American troops all day long driving through the camp.  He recalled,

 

“Eisenhower ordered all American troops within a hundred mile radius of Ohrdruf and not on the front line to come through the camp to see what happened there so they would know what they were fighting for.  They would circle through the camp and then leave, never stopping or getting out.  They didn’t even have anyone there to explain what it was.”

His unit collected Albert on their way to the front.  They continued on through Germany, through Munich and Leipzig, fighting German resistance all the way.  Once they crossed into Czechoslovakia, though, the resistance waned.  “They seemed to quit, and they were coming in and just surrendering as fast as they could.”

 

They stopped at Ebensee, a resort town next to a horrible hellhole of a camp, Mauthausen.  They bivouacked there in a large farmhouse for several months.  It was from this area that Albert was taken to share a very memorable Passover Seder in April, 1946.

 

A Memorable Seder

 

Albert and another Jewish soldier from his battalion made the hundred mile trip to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest by jeep.  Sitting atop Kehlstein Mountain in the German Alps, the Eagle’s Nest was a gift to Hitler on his 50th birthday in April 1939.***  Albert joined a Jewish Army chaplain and about forty other Jewish GIs for a traditional Passover Seder.  Although they didn’t have much time before the meal started, Albert did take time to gaze out of the windows of the large rooms and take a stroll around the patio.  The celebrants sat at two long tables as the…

 

“Rabbi began with a little speech about what a horror story the whole Holocaust was and this [dinner] was sort of a comeuppance for us to be able to have a Seder at the Eagle’s Nest.  We then had a traditional, strictly kosher, Passover Seder that was prepared on the premises.  We had the parsley, a little cup of salt water we could dip in, and of course, matzos, gefiltefish, and roasted chicken.  We had what I call a compote for dessert, a lot of fruit cooked together.

 

“We spent about two and a half to three hours there.  We went with the traditional Seder, the first part lasting about forty-five minutes.  The second part lasted longer with the dinner and the traditional songs.  We spent probably an hour or more singing all the different traditional songs, and people from all different parts of the country came up with different songs they knew and we sang them in many different melodies – that’s the way with all these Jewish prayers turned into songs.  It was very, very good.

 

“They thought that was a very appropriate place to have a Seder.  I don’t think I was feeling revenge… because how can you avenge six million deaths?  But [rather] I was thinking, ‘we prevailed.’”

 

Albert had spent one other Passover and High Holy Days in theater, but remembers not being able to celebrate as they were on the move.  He remained in Europe until July of 1946.

 

Coming Home

 

Albert sailed home and arrived in a port in the Chesapeake in Maryland in July of 1946.  He was twenty-two years young, but had experienced enough life to rival a man many years older.  His recollection of his landing was the amazement they all had when they saw the parking lot full of cars.  “Our eyes just popped.  We hadn’t seen so many cars like that for years.”

 

And when he asked what we thought they all wanted first, he answered no to the suggestions of women, cigarettes, booze, and hot showers.  “MILK – that’s what they all wanted – milk.  It had been years since we had had milk.”  The local restaurants were prepared for these milk-deprived returning troops, and they each downed a quart of milk before they continued on their way home!

 

Although he did not speak of his experience earlier, he did get his Luger.  He also disappointed his family with his gifts for them.  When his unit came upon a German factory that made beautiful (he thought) silver combination cigarette case and lighter, he snagged three – one for his mother and one for each of his two sisters, all of whom smoked.  They were nicer than any made in the US.  But hearing stories of returning soldiers who presented their family with whole sets of silver service or other ornate items, Albert’s family was disappointed with their souvenirs.  Maybe he considered going back for better souvenirs?

 

After Albert finished presenting his story to my classes, I asked him if he had recorded his very important story, and he said no he had not.  I told him he should.  So now his story is recorded as he recalls it.  Albert has done his part to make sure we don’t forget.  We need to honor his experience by remembering, by making sure others don’t forget, and by making sure it never happens again.

 

 

(*), (**), (***)   

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Ohrdruf/index.html