Americans Soldiers/Holocaust Survivors Reunion-Sept. 22-26, 2009

If you know you are coming you can book your travel according to the schedule below. The main airport is Albany International Airport (ALB), about an hour south just down I-87, the Adirondack Northway.

When I have a contract with the main venue hotel I will post the details… Thanks .

RELATED LINKS OF INTEREST

http://www.visitlakegeorge.com/

http://www.adirondackchamber.org/

http://visit.cityofglensfalls.com/

Tuesday, Sept. 22	Wednesday, Sept. 23	Thursday, Sept. 24	Friday, Sept. 25	Saturday, Sept. 26
Arrival If you wish, interviews with film crews. Welcoming Dinner, Hotel	Breakfast in Hudson Falls -Reunion Program, school Catered Luncheon, school -Reunion Program, school Dinner Cruise, Lake George	Breakfast, Hotel -Reunion Program, school Catered Luncheon, school -Reunion Program, school Dinner, Hotel	Breakfast, Hotel -Reunion Program, school Catered Luncheon, school -Reunion Program, school Final Banquet, Hotel	Departure

In Valor, There is Hope.

I think it is a given that the tragic loss of security guard Stephen Johns on Wednesday will serve to strengthen our commitments, as United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellows, to persevere all the more in our missions.

Here is a post from Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal, which sums up how we feel about the Museum staff as well.

June 10, 2009

This is Personal

By Mark Blumenthal

Regular readers will probably remember my that my father-in-law Frank Burstin, who passed away about a week before last fall’s elections, was a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp. For that reason, as you may imagine, the news this afternoon about a shooting at Washington’s Holocaust Museum hits pretty close to home for me and for my family.

But you don’t know the half of it.

I have a special memory of Pop (as we knew him) from last summer. It was a few weeks before he received his cancer diagnosis, during what turned out to be his last visit to the Holocaust Museum. Because he lost his parents and all of his siblings to the Nazis, and because no grave site exists for any of his family, Pop made it a habit to visit the Museum at least once a year. It fulfilled for him the custom that many Jews practice of visiting the cemetery of loved ones once a year. I only got to accompany him on one of these visits, that one last year, along with my wife’s nephew Jake.

I described him last year as “kind and optimistic soul,” and he certainly was. But when he entered that museum, something changed. He was not unkind, but in that place, as I soon learned, he suffered no fools (nor anyone else).

We wandered into the museum, through the same doors and into the same foyer where shots rang out this afternoon. My wife had given us visitor passes that she receives as a member of the Museum. The lines were long, and it was not obvious which line we needed to stand in.

Pop was having none of it. He walked away from me and wandered up to the museum staffer standing at the head of the long line leading to the elevators that takes all visitors to the museum exhibits. I thought for a moment that Pop was going to ask directions. I was wrong.

He thrust out his arm in the direction of the staffer, displaying the number the Nazis tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz just a few inches from her face. Without making eye-contact and barely breaking stride, Pop kept walking. Understandably, the staffer barely blinked. She didn’t make a move to stop him.

Pop kept walking right into the elevator that had just filled with the visitors that had been waiting in that long line. And even though the elevator was already quite crowded, he walked right in. Jake and I had to run past the guard to catch up. “Pop, Pop,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed, hoping to talk him into at least waiting for the next elevator.

The staffer inside the elevator must have heard me, because he smiled, held the door and said with smile, “We have room for Pop. You guys too. C’mon in.”

And up we went. I have been to the Holocaust Museum many times, but none as memorable as that visit.

About a month ago, in a conscious effort to carry on her father’s tradition and to commemorate his birthday, my wife Helen paid her own solo visit to the Museum. She arrived at the end of a busy work day, in a rush, just a few minutes before closing time. Unfortunately, given the late hour, they had run out of the candles usually provided in the Hall of Remembrance for visitors to light and leave in the niches of the outer walls.

Already feeling emotional — her dad had passed away just six months before — she broke down sobbing.

A staffer nearby immediately came to her assistance, asking if she needed help. She explained, and the gentleman asked her to wait. He soon returned with a candle, explaining with a conspiratorial wink that he kept his own special supply for such emergencies.

The guards and staff at the Holocaust Museum have a special duty. The do more than just protect and operate one of Washington’s many heavily trafficked museums. On a daily basis, they help open the doors to the elderly survivors of the atrocities of World War II. As my stories attest, they do it with a remarkable degree of kindness and professionalism.

As far as I know, the Holocaust Museum personnel that we encountered were not armed guards, though it is possible they were. But when I heard about the shooting this afternoon, and more specifically that at least one of the victims is a security guard now apparently in critical condition, it struck very close to home.

This is personal.

As far as I am concerned, the staff members of the Holocaust Museum are part of our family and the Museum itself is hallowed ground. We pray for the recovery of the wounded guard. “Never take your guard force and security people for granted,” William Parsons, the museum’s chief of staff said on television a few minutes ago. Our family never will.

A very sad update: MSNBC just reported that the guard, Officer Steven Tyrone Johns, has passed away. We are all mourners tonight.

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/this_is_personal.php

D-Day, Sixty-Five Years On.

I came into school today, on a Saturday, to start packing up my room for a move to another room.

But it is the 6th of June.

Instead I am getting nothing done, mesmerized by the scenes, live from Normandy, of the 65th anniversary celebration.

The President is there and so are 250 American veterans of the battle for Normandy,  including one of my good  friends, Buster Simmons, of the 30th Infantry Division. The Greatest Generations Foundation sponsored his visit with 9 other vets and college kids. Now I’m looking for him in the sea of faces.

My son Ned and I watched him last night as a “Person of the Week” on ABC World News in a story I contributed to. If you view the clip, you can see the photograph I provided ABC with, taken by Major Clarence Benjamin, of the liberation of the train. This is the photo that Buster uses when he speaks to high school classes to tell this story.

I am hopeful that we can get Buster to come to our high school for the last liberator-survivor reunion in September.

It was twenty five years ago, on this anniversary, that I wrote an essay in the local newspaper expressing my appreciation for the veterans of World War II. And as I begin to sort through and pack up 20+ years of memories in this room, three things are becoming clear: 1) my love for these men and women and what they did only increases as time passes; 2) the rest of my career will be focused on the promotion of narrative history in the classroom, linking students, veterans and survivors together; and 3) I won’t be getting any packing done this day.

Take a minute to watch Buster in the clip and take his optimism about the future of our nation to heart. Especially if -”you’re an American.”

The Story with Dick Gordon.

The Story with Dick Gordon.

Steve Barry and Carrol Walsh did an interview with Dick Gordon of American Public Media for National Public Radio. It was broadcast, appropriately, on Memorial Day. Very well done and very powerful.

You can read the previous post for  more information and links.

You can go to the link here to listen in.    For Memorial Day: A Special Reunion

The Holocaust Survivor and the US Army Ranger…

(originally posted November, 2007)…are one in the same person! Had a great lesson 4th block today.

My high school seniors and I were treated to a wonderful interview with Mr. Steve Barry, 83, of Florida, who graphically described his liberation from that train nearly 63 years ago. He said “The South Florida Sun-Sentinel published an article titled “Vet unites with 3 death train survivors” Needless to say I was in a state of shock, and to some degree I still am, to find out after all the years, that the event burned in to my soul for all eternity, is shared with a lot of other people.” He went on to relate to my students and I the account of his ordeal and liberation, his emigration to the United States and his experience in becoming the “happiest Korean War draftee”, who ironically served his adopted country as a US Army Ranger in Germany.

His written account of his meeting with his liberator Carrol Walsh follows:

SOMETIMES THE FACTS OF REALITY DWARF THE WILDEST FICTION.

NOTE* The story continues…Steve, a Hungarian Jew, lives in Florida is one of the 13 latest survivors to see the Associated Press article on our reunion and contact us. (*now 60+ survivors) He was 21 at time of liberation and remembers a mobile SS death squad setting up their guns near the train. The people refused to get out of the boxcars as everyone knew the Americans were nearby…

My odds to meet, after 62 years, one of the brave soldiers who came across “ That Train Near Magdeburg” on April 13, 1945 was less then nil. I beat those odds and managed to survive and preserve my body and sanity.

Carrol Walsh fought his way from Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge and to the Elbe River earning five well-deserved battle stars. For him, coming upon that train and a mass of emaciated, skeletal men, women and children was only one of many sad episodes of the war. Little did he realize it then that to me and countless other survivors he became an ICON rekindling our faith in human kindness. He became our LIBERATOR and will always remain that.

As it was prearranged on November 3, 2007, after picking up my daughter Barbara at the Tampa airport, (she flew in from Baltimore just for the occasion, traveling with my daughter Jamie and son-in-law Jerry, drove to the home of the Walsh’s in New Port Richey, FL. Carrol and his wife Dorothy stood at the driveway waiting for us.

I walked over to Carrol, shook his hand and we embraced, then I proceeded to kiss Dorothy. My entire family followed my example. Later after our meeting came to a conclusion, Carrol and I both felt like two old friends meeting after many years.

Inside, the table was set for coffee and tea and assorted snacks. We decided that it was more important first to engage in conversation, reminiscing about the discovery of the train and the aftermath. It was sort of a Q & E. Then we talked about our lives after the war. We learned that Carrol became a State Supreme Court Justice. We exchange some pictures and observed a wonderful photo of the Walsh’s large, attractive family.

During conversation it was discovered that Carrol’s grandson, Sean, attends G. W. University just as my granddaughter Amanda does.

Meeting Carrol and Dorothy Walsh is one of my most treasured experiences. They are, without a doubt, the sweetest, warmest and kindest people I have met. Meeting Carrol was dream come through and I especially enjoyed his boundless sense of humor.

Dear friends, Carrol and Dorothy, you restored some of my faith in humanity and I never, ever will forget the privilege to know you and call you my friends.

Steve

Boca Raton, FL 11/04/2007

P. S. Yes, there are Angels but they have no wings; we call them FRIENDS.

“Red” Walsh to Steve: “You don’t owe us – we owe you! We can never repay you and the Jewish people of Europe what was stolen from you – your homes, your possessions, your businesses, your money, your art, your family life, your families, your childhood, your dreams and all your lives.

The least I and the other American soldiers could do was to eliminate such people as the Nazis and their armies and their police and leaders … doing what we were morally obligated to do.”

PLEASE VISIT “ABOUT THIS WEBLOG” FOR INFORMATION ON THE HIGH SCHOOL PROJECT THAT BROUGHT CARROL AND STEVE TOGETHER…

READ THE ORIGINAL INTERVIEW WITH CARROL WALSH

HEAR THE TWO TANK COMMANDERS DESCRIBE THE LIBERATION 9:32

SEE CARROL’S MEETING WITH SURVIVOR FRED SPIEGEL 3:12

Contact the teacher, Matthew Rozell, at marozell@hfcsd.org

REMEMBER.

Scene #1: The morning of December 16, 1944. A lonely outpost on the Belgian frontier.

In subzero temperatures, the last German counteroffensive of World War II had begun. Nineteen thousand American lives would be lost in the Battle of the Bulge. “Hell came in like a freight train. I heard an explosion and went back to where my friend was. His legs were blown off-he bled to death in my arms.” The average age of the American “replacement” soldier? 19.

Scene #2: Memorial Day, sixty-plus years later. In a small town in the United States, it is a day off from work or school and it is the unofficial start to the busy summer season. We sit in our lawn chairs, we chat with neighbors and sip our drinks when the gentlemen with the flag march past.

The holiday known originally as “Decoration Day” originated at the end of the Civil War when a general order was issued designating May 30, 1868, “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” When Congress passed a law formally recognizing the last Monday in May as the day of national celebration, we effectively got our three-day weekend and our de facto beginning of summer.

Of the sixteen million American men and women who served in WWII, a half million died on the field of conflict. In 2009, over 1000 veterans of World War II quietly slip away every day. The national memory of the war that did more than any other event in the last century to shape the history of the American nation is dying with them. Incredibly, it comes as a shock to many Americans today that the “Battle of the Bulge” didn’t originate as a weight-loss term.

In the high school where I teach, I have been inviting veterans to my classroom to share their experiences with our students. As their numbers dwindled, I smartened up, bought a camera, and began to record their stories. We’ve spoken at length with a pilot forced to bail out at 28,000 feet of his flaming B-17 bomber, only to watch crew members die in the subsequent explosion and then be taken prisoner himself. We have had conversations with POWs who survived forced marches in brutal weather, and with Jewish infantrymen who were among the first to liberate the death camp at Dachau. We have met men who were handcuffed to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and who were assigned to suicide watch guard shifts there after fighting their way across Germany. We listen to what it was like to sail eerily into Pearl Harbor 36 hours after the Japanese attack and see no lights except the USS Arizona still blazing with the bodies of hundreds of Americans entombed in it. We are with the torpedo bomber pilot as he takes off from the flight deck of the carrier USS Yorktown during the epic battle of Midway, and is forced to land on the deck of another carrier as the Yorktown burns and later slides to the bottom of the sea. A blind Marine describes what it was like to lose his eyesight nearly sixty years after being struck by mortar fragments, not once, but twice in the same day at Okinawa (and he told us that ” the hardest part was telling my mother”). We ride with the tank commander fighting across Nazi Germany for mind-numbing eighteen hour days, a self-described “fugitive from the law of averages”, as his tank crests a hill to a sudden encounter with a train transport of emaciated and suffering Jewish concentration camp victims. A former 17 year old from our town tells us what it was like to share a shell crater for a sleepless night with a headless fellow Marine in the  black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima. My students and I are just “one person away” from the shock of Pearl Harbor, the chaos at Omaha Beach and the Huertgen Forest, the horrors of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Peleliu Island.

Sixty-plus years ago these men and women saved the world.  I think about this: by the time my teaching career ends in 10 or 15 years, almost all of these veterans will be gone.  Some of them I have already lost.

It’s not enough that I have an interest in their stories. I have long looked out into a sea of faces, some students mildly interested in what I have to say, but many others displaying a quiet and disturbing apathy about the past. What is infinitely reassuring and comforting to me, however, is that they all seem to have a genuine interest in a “real” connection with the past, with a person who becomes the ultimate source, because he or she was there.

 

These men and women have helped to spark students’ interest in finding out more about our nation’s past and the role of the individual in shaping it. On our website we have worked to weave the stories of our community’s sacrifices into the fabric of our national history. And that, to me, is what teaching history should be all about. After all, if we allow ourselves to forget about the teenager who bled to death in his buddy’s arms, if we overlook the sacrifices it took to make this nation strong and proud, we may as well forget everything else. Where will we be when there is nothing important about our past to remember? The answer is found in simple study of any other great civilization in history that allowed the collective memory of the past that once bound them together to be trivialized and blurred, to be eroded away and forgotten-

They’re not here anymore.                                                                                  This Memorial Day,

Remember.

Clarence was my father’s older cousin. He was twenty years old. If you click on the group photograph, he is the tall one in the center with the cross that someone drew over his head. In the first photo, my daughter Mary is at his grave in St. Mary’s cemetery in Fort Edward, NY, this past weekend. We were decorating graves with my high school students.

Dad remembered Clarence coming home on leave and teasing him in a playful manner- Dad was just a kid. But so was Clarence. He was a gunner in a B-17 crew. He didn’t come back. None of the crew in the photograph did.

 

They were all killed on July 29, 1944.

The Last Battle-Major Julius Rock.

I received this email while I was at the last liberator-survivor reunion.

March 27th, 2009.

“Dear Mr. Rozell,

My father was a medical officer with the 30th Infantry.  It is astounding to me that I saw the article just now in the NY Times on line, and this week will be my father’s 20th Yahrzeit (anniversary of his death).  Cornelius Ryan interviewed him for the book The Last Battle. On page 329 of that book he wrote:

“The psychological effect of the camps on officers and men was beyond assessment.  On the Ninth Army front in a village near Magdeburg, Major Julius Rock, a medical officer with the 30th Infantry, came up to inspect a freight train which the 30th had stopped.  It was loaded with concentration camp inmates.  Rock, horrified, immediately unloaded the train.  Over the local burgomaster’s vehement protests, Rock billeted the inmates in German homes–but not until his battalion commander had given a crisp command to the complaining burgomaster. “If you refuse,”he said simply, “I’ll take hostages and shoot them.”

After the book was published, my father received a letter from a Connecticut woman who had been a child on that train, along with her mother.  Dad had never spoken about this to me, but he began to talk about it.  He talked about the strict orders given about how to feed the liberated survivors; he said that only rice water was to be given for the first several days.  I understand that in other places many survivors died in similar situations from gastro-intestinal shutdown from being overfed.

All of my father’s maps and pictures are archived in the Jewish War Veterans’ Museum in Washington, D.C.  I do have some photocopies of some of the pictures, including, I believe, the train.

Thank you for keeping alive this outstanding testimony to the heroism of these brave soldiers, survivors and physicians.”

I’m heading to Washington this summer to conduct more research at the Holocaust Museum and to see Rock’s documents at the Jewish War Veterans’ Museum. I have  located the woman in CT that this writer speaks of, as well as 60 or so other child survivors. Actually, she located me almost 2 years ago, and now Rock’s daughter has found me.

And to find this information in a major work that was published 4 decades ago is amazing to me. I asked the school librarian to see if we had it yesterday. He handed me a first edition that had not circulated since 1978! It is chock full of references to the 30th Infantry Division, and in the back I even found in his list of interviewees  a 30th ID vet from Hudson Falls, NY, our own town! I’ll be chasing down that lead, you can be sure.

Post Script: I was very lucky to find author Cornelius Ryan’s (The Longest Day,  The Last Battle, A Bridge Too Far”) daughter as well. He passed away in 1974. When the star studded film “A Bridge Too Far” came out, I remember it was one of the rare moments in high school when my father and I did something together and went to see the film at the local cinema (and I remember it vividly- we both commented how much our butts hurt from sitting for three hours in the uncomfortable chairs, but it was still a father-teenage son moment).

I also called the widow of the 30th Infantry Division veteran that Ryan interviewed for the book from our own small town- he passed away the same year as Ryan, 35 years ago. But his widow remembered the interview well. Now I’m off in search of additional liberators of the train in Ryan’s notes with his archivist in Ohio.

Mr Ryan’s daughter wrote to me a few nights ago (Mr. Ryan was born in Dublin, went to England, and served as a war correspondent before settling in the US):

“This is really a amazing series of events.. Strange, I was watching Schindler’s List on HBO last night and I was so moved by the ending when the living survivors paid tribute to him at his headstone. I guess I will never be able to “get my head around” what happened to the Jewish people and man’s inhumanity to man.

You have certainly touched on a special person in my life, my father. Oh how he would have loved to have heard this. I can just imagine him putting on his high British accent (something he learned to do when he went to England at 19 years old. Apparently having an Irish brogue was not synonymous with being particularly learned.). Anyway, he would have loved this new information and the fact you have located the woman in CT and so many other child survivors. I am pretty sure he would have been thrilled. While I know that my father was quite able to be true to the specific “facts”, I believe what interested him the most were the people. He used to say that the “major players” had plenty of notoriety and any “Tom, Dick or Harry could write about those poor bastards.” But he believed, it was the “little people, caught up in the tragedy of war” who had the real stories to tell. And once again, he was right.”

Cornelius Ryan was the rock star amongst U.S. WWII historians. To find these references in his book and to be in contact with his family… she concluded with:

“How great of you to send me news of this. There are really no coincidences…..these interlocking series of events were all truly too remarkable…Seems to me that someone is hollering at you to follow your dream. “

Yom Hashoah.

I was the guest speaker at a local temple this evening. It was a beautiful ceremony of remembrance, with music and song…. I may have been the only non-Jew there and I was the honored guest.

Honored guest!

I kept biting my lip and hoping I would not lose it, or cry, when it was my turn to speak. And then it dawns on me… the last time I got really emotional about all this was at the same time last year, sitting in the temple, participating in the service and waiting for the cue. Sometimes I wonder how I manage to hold it all together… and I know it’s because I do not force myself to slow down and think about it all.

Why is this happening to me? How can I be so blessed as to be a conduit between survivors and their new found liberators, the American soldiers responsible for the lives and the families that they have created over the past 64 years? Why do these new coincidences and miracles, these amazing  people with stories of tragedy and triumph, of survival against the odds, keep coming to my inbox or telephone, without solicitation? Why do these amazing, interconnected and intertwining  threads seem almost to be weaving themselves into a tapestry of unfolding time?  In the end, I can’t go there. How can I? Just let it be, just let it unfold, I tell myself.

We slowly recite the names: Belsen, Sobibor, Belzec, Buchenwald, Dachau, Treblinka, Chelmno, Auschwitz…, read the poems of destruction and the prayers of hope, and wonder about the redemption of the human race. The Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, is said.

It was touch and go for me for a little while. In the end, I did fine. Folks were very thankful and kept coming up to me after the service. A very nice lady came up and proudly insisted that she was my fourth grade teacher, though I don’t think that she was.

I told the congregation of my work and the work of my colleagues with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And I informed them of the death of our liberator Dr. George C.  Gross. I read to them the eyewitness liberator account that I received out of the blue on March 11th, and told them of our recent reunion and our plans for one final upcoming reunion between liberators and many survivors.

At the very end, a beautiful older woman approached me as I left the temple and told me that before her conversion to Judaism 15 years ago, she had never been taught about the Holocaust and knew very little of it…then, as she made small talk and I was contemplating my exit strategy, she touched me,  held my hand and stroked my arm warmly, and told me that I was blessed, and that I had a special place in heaven. God himself is preparing a special place. But not too soon, I try to joke.

The greatest crime in the history of the world. And I guess my own personal responsibility is to try to keep the memory alive, because it will fade as our liberators and survivors pass on.

But not too soon, I hope.

Painting: Martin Spett, The Ashes”

Each mound of victims’ ashes represents a different concentration camp. A traditional depiction of Death hovers over the six inmates of a camp who represent the six-million Jewish casualties during the Holocaust. On the left foreground is the exhortation: “Remember” in six languages.
Martin Spett was liberated on the train near Magdeburg.

Holocaust Survivors Meet their Liberators, First Time Since 1945

Liberators and Holocaust Survivors Reunited-World War II Living History Project

Survivors, (seated) 30th Infantry Division, Matthew Rozell. 3-27-09.

‘They were our angels’

Reunion sparks memories of Nazi prisoners’ train trip to freedom

By Schuyler Kropf, The Charleston Post and Courier

Saturday, March 28, 2009

They were teenaged G.I.s, happy that World War II was winding down and that they’d survived. But the story of what happened that April morning in 1945 still lingers.

It involved a train shuffling 2,500 Jews from one death camp to another as the Nazis tried to hide their crimes. But with American units approaching, the German guards had no choice but to strip off their uniforms and flee, abandoning their human cargo near a forest.

Luckily for 5-year-old Dutch Jew John Fransman, and the other riders of the liberation train, the U.S. Army showed up a few hours later. He remembers his mother’s body language changing when the soldiers came into view.

“It was transmitted that this was good, that we were being rescued,” said Fransman, now 64, of London.

For decades the tale of the liberation train was a forgotten chapter of World War II. But Friday in North Charleston, surviving members of the

Army’s 30th Infantry Division returned for a reunion that brought the story back.

Most of the U.S. troops who were there for the train rescue, near Magdeburg in northeastern Germany, have died. But seven of the train’s riders – who in 1945 were teens and children assigned to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – have come in from all over the world.

Hungarian-born Jews Stephen Barry, 84, and Robert Spitz, 79, both lived in Budapest before the war and were sent to Bergen-Belsen, later surviving the train ride. But they’d never met before Friday, with Spitz coming in from Raleigh, N.C., and Barry from Boca Raton, Fla. “Ten minutes ago,” Spitz said of their new friendship.

Much of the train story came to light only in the last few years, including after history teacher Matthew Rozell of Hudson Falls, N.Y., got his students involved in World War II histories, sparking an Internet flurry of interest among survivors, soldiers and family members.

As the tale goes, the month of April 1945 was marked by a general collapse in Germany. The Nazis began shuffling prisoners around in movements that seemingly had no clear destinations. But on the fifth or sixth day of travel for the Bergen-Belsen prisoners, all movement stopped, with the train parked alongside a wooded ravine and the German guards in distress. The emaciated prisoners, many sick with typhoid and infested by “10 million lice” Spitz said, stood by waiting for something to happen.

Barry remembers German SS troops on horseback trying to push everyone out of the cars, movements that were physically impossible for some. The troops finally gave up and rode off, only to return an hour later – a signal Barry took to mean they were surrounded. Hours later, units of the American 30th Infantry began moving in.

“They were our angels,” said Ariela Rojek, 75, a train rider who emigrated to Canada after the war. She remembers the strange looks on the faces of war-hardened G.I.s who weren’t used to seeing atrocities against civilians. “They weren’t prepared,” she said.

One American who remembers the refugees was Frank Towers, a 26-year-old Army lieutenant whose job included rounding up dozens of trucks and finding beds for the survivors in nearby villages.

Until then, he didn’t fully appreciate the anti-German soldier propaganda he’d seen. “The German people weren’t these kinds of monsters,” he’d thought before finding the train riders.

For the survivors, rescue marked the start of a long road of recovery, searching for relatives and starting new lives. But Barry still remembers one moment after his rescue when he sat by a campfire wearing a German SS soldier’s coat that he’d found to keep warm. An American G.I. came up to him, pulled out a pocket knife and cut the SS emblems off the jacket, dropping them in the fire.

“He didn’t say a word, but he didn’t have to,” Barry recalled, as the reality of his new life of freedom set in.
Copyright © 1995 – 2009 Evening Post Publishing Co.

NOTE: This newspaper did a fine article and has some video which you may be able to view here.

LINK TO ASSOCIATED PRESS ARTICLE/PHOTOGRAPHS

LINK TO LOCAL NEWS VIDEO/STORY

A Liberator’s 1945 Eyewitness Account of the Farsleben train appears.

April 17^th. (1945)

Dear Chaplain;-

Haven’t written you in many months now, its funny how a few moments are so hard to find in which to write a letter way past due; it’s much easier to keep putting it off the way I’ve done. I’ll try to make up for it in this letter.

Today I saw a sight that’s impossible to describe, however I’ll try. Between 2400 and 3000 German refugees were overran by my division during our last operation; most of them were, or had been, inmates of concentration camps, their crimes the usual ones, – Jewish parentage, political differences with der Fuhrer, lack of sympathy for the SS, or just plain bad luck. Not one of these hundreds could walk one mile and survive; they had been packed on a train whose normal capacity was perhaps four or five hundred, and had been left there days without food.

Our division military government unit took charge of them, and immediately saw what a huge job it was going to be, so they sent out a call for help. Several of our officers went out to help them organize the camp they were setting up for them. The situation was extremely ticklish we soon learned; no one could smoke as it started a riot when the refugees saw the cigarette, and we couldn’t give the kiddies anything or they would have been trampled to death in the rush that would result when anything resembling food was displayed. The only nourishment they were capable of eating was soup; now the army doesn’t issue any of the Heinz’s 57 varieties, so we watered down C-ration[s] and it served quite well.  It was necessary to use force to make the people stay in line in order to serve them. They had no will power left, only the characteristics of beasts.

A few weeks of decent food will change them into a semblance of normal human beings; with God willing the plague of disease that was already underway, will be diverted; but I’m wondering what the affect of their ordeal they have been through, will be on their minds; most will carry scars for the rest of their days for the beatings that they were given. No other single thing had convinced me as this experience has that Germany isn’t fit to survive as a nation. I’ll never forget today.

I was going to write mother tonight but thought better of it. I’ll be in a better frame of mind tomorrow. I’m only a few dozen miles from Berlin right now, and its hard to realize the end is in sight. I’m always glad to receive your scandal sheet. You perhaps missed your calling, as your editorial abilities are quite plain.

As ever,

Charles.             (transcribed by Kaylee Merlow, HFHS ‘11.)

March 11th, 2009

Dear Mr. Rozell:

My father-in-law was 1st. Lt. Charles M. Kincaid. He was a Liason Officer with the 30th. Division Artillery.  He was honored with an Air Medal in the battle of Mortain and a Bronze Medal in the battle of St. Lo.  In the battle of Mortain he won his Air Medal by calling in artillery adjustments while flying in a Piper L-4 over 4 panzer divisions on August 9, 1944.

He rarely wrote home. He did write home to his minister about one event that evidently really caused him to stop and think. Attached is a copy of that letter that his sister transcribed – making copies for others to read.  The letter describes the Farsleben train and his experience there.

I need to thank you for your website and work. You and your students work enabled me to connect the letter with the actual historical event. It further enabled me to show my children the pictures and to make their Grandfather’s experience real, not just an old letter – that this event so affected him that he needed to tell his minister before he told his mother.

Thank you,
Mark A.