70 years later, Warsaw ghetto survivor recalls Jewish uprising against the Nazis.

70 years later, Warsaw ghetto survivor in Israel recalls Jewish uprising against the Nazis

By Aron Heller, Associated Press, Saturday, April 6, 1:42 PM

Note: This woman, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was liberated by the Americans on the Train near Magdeburg. Her Displaced Persons card below attests to this.

Aliza Vitis-Shomron by Ariel Schalit / AP Photo

JERUSALEM — Two days before her comrades embarked on an uprising that came to symbolize Jewish resistance against the Nazis in World War II, 14-year-old Aliza Mendel got her orders: Escape from the Warsaw Ghetto.

The end was near. Nazi troops had encircled the ghetto, and the remaining Jewish rebels inside were prepared to die fighting. They had few weapons, and they felt there was no point in giving one of them to a teenage girl whose main task to that point had been distributing leaflets.

“They told me I was too young to fight,” said the survivor, now 84, who uses her married name, Aliza Vitis-Shomron. “They said, ‘You have to leave and tell the world how we died fighting the Nazis. That is your job now.’”

She’s been doing that ever since, publishing a memoir about life in the ghetto and lecturing about the revolt and its legendary leader, Mordechai Anielewicz. While nearly all her friends perished, she survived the ghetto and a later period in a Nazi concentration camp. She made it to Israel, married and has three children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

On Sunday night, 70 years after the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Vitis-Shomron is set to speak on behalf of Holocaust survivors at the official ceremony marking Israel’s annual Holocaust memorial day.

“It’s a day of deep sorrow for me, because I remember all my friends in the (resistance) movement who gave their lives,” said Vitis-Shomron. “But it was also a wonderful act of sacrifice by those who gave up their lives without even trying to save themselves. The goal was to show that we would not go down without a response.”

Six million Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust of World War II, wiping out a third of world Jewry.

The 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising was the first large-scale rebellion against the Nazis in Europe and the single greatest act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Though guaranteed to fail, it became a symbol of struggle against impossible conditions, illustrated a refusal to succumb to Nazi atrocities and inspired other acts of uprising and underground resistance by Jews and non-Jews alike.

While the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, Israel’s annual Holocaust memorial day coincides with the Hebrew date of the Warsaw ghetto uprising — highlighting the role it plays in the country’s psyche. Even the day’s official name — “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day” — alludes to the image of the Jewish warrior upon which the state was founded. The ghetto battle contrasts with the image of Jews meekly marching to their deaths.

Israel has wrestled with the competing images for decades. After setting up their state in 1948, just three years after the end of the war, Israelis preferred to emphasize the heroic resistance fighters, though their numbers were relatively small. In recent years they have come around to recognizing the overwhelming tragedy of the murder of millions of Jews and the traumas of the survivors who still live along them.

Before the war, Warsaw had a vibrant Jewish community, and a third of the city’s population was Jewish. The Nazis built the Warsaw ghetto in 1940, a year after occupying Poland, and began herding Jews into it.

The ghetto initially held some 380,000 Jews who were cramped into tight living spaces. At its peak, the ghetto housed about a half a million Jews, said Havi Dreifuss, a researcher at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial who has studied the ghetto.

Life in the ghetto included random raids, confiscations and abductions by Nazi soldiers. Disease and starvation were rampant, and bodies often appeared on the streets.

The resistance movement began to grow after the deportation of July 22, 1942, when 265,000 men, women and children were rounded up and later killed at the Treblinka death camp. As word of the Nazi genocide spread, those who remained behind no longer believed German promises that they would be sent to forced labor camps.

A small group of rebels began to spread calls for resistance, carrying out isolated acts of sabotage and attacks. Some Jews began defying German orders to report for deportation.

The Nazis entered the ghetto on April 19, 1943, the eve of the Passover holiday. Three days later, the Nazis set the ghetto ablaze, turning it into a fiery death trap, but the Jewish fighters kept up their struggle for nearly a month.

The Jewish fighters who had fortified themselves in bunkers and hiding places managed to kill 16 Nazis and wound almost 100, Dreifuss said.

They were ultimately brutally vanquished. Anielewicz and others died inside the bunker on 18 Mila Street, which later became the title of a famous novel by Leon Uris that fictionalized the events.

“It was a moral victory. No one believed the Jews would fight back,” said Dreifuss. “It’s amazing that after three years of Nazi occupation, starvation and illness, these people found the strength to disobey the Nazi orders, stand up and fight back.”

Anielewicz, who was in his early 20s, became a heroic figure in Israel, with a village and streets across the nation named in his honor.

Vitis-Shomron remembers him well. She said he was a tall, charismatic leader of a younger generation who refused to submit quietly to the Nazis as their parents did.

“His theory was, ‘don’t get used to what is happening. Don’t accept it,’” she said. “The Nazis wanted to turn us into slaves, and he said that only free people could resist.”

The approach put Vitis-Shomron at odds with her parents, who objected to her activity in the youth movement. Often she would defy the Nazi curfew and only return home in the morning. She narrowly escaped S.S. officers in the streets as she posted underground leaflets calling on Jews to resist or escape.

She said the hardest part for her was escaping before the uprising began, joining her mother and younger sister in their hideout on the Polish side of town outside the ghetto. She remembers watching the red skies above the burning ghetto, where her friends were waging war.

Aliza Vitis-Shomron by Ariel Schalit / AP Photo. Card reads: Camp: Hillersleben. Liberation: 13 April 1945. Farsleben, 10km from Magdeburg.

“If it was up to me, I would have stayed behind and fought to the death with them. I had no fear,” she said. “The uprising represented Jewish pride. It was us saying, ‘we will not die the way you want us to. We will die the way we want to, as free people.’”

Vitis-Shomron was later captured and sent the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with her mother and sister. They all survived and eventually made it to Israel. Her father was deported from the ghetto and killed in a Nazi death camp.

Today, Vitis-Shomron volunteers for Yad Vashem, collecting pages of testimony from fellow survivors that help build the museum’s depository of names of the victims.

Despite her own past, she claims not to have experienced the psychological damage that plague other survivors.

“I never saw myself as a victim. I was on the active side, the resisting side,” she said. “It helped me cope.”

Online: http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/warsaw_ghetto_testimonies/index.asp

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

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“I thought it might be a prank call. But then she started talking about my unit, and I knew she was real. It was just a shock.”

{Some light editing has been done on this story to honor promises of anonymity, and to correct and clarify on my end.}

Cheating the death train

By JEFF WILKINSON The State

Columbia, SC

Sixty-some odd years after he was a litter bearer carrying the dead and dying from a death train liberated by US troops in World War II, Grier Taylor of Batesburg-Leesville got a call from Israel. It was a daughter of one of the victims, thanking him for his service. “Without you, I would not be here,” said the woman. – TIM DOMINICK /tdominick@thestate.com

A few days before Christmas, 89-year-old World War II veteran Grier Taylor of Batesburg-Leesville got an unexpected telephone call.
The woman on the other end of the line spoke halting English, but her message was clear: She wanted to thank Taylor for helping to save her father’s life.
Her father, now a physician in Israel, was a 14-year-old boy on April 13, 1945 – one of about 2,500 filthy, starving prisoners of Germany’s infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The suffering souls – 700 of them children – had been packed into boxcars in a veritable death train. They were bound for an uncertain future in another camp farther away from the front lines when they were liberated by advancing American troops.

“She said, ‘Merry Christmas.’ I said, ‘Happy Hanukkah,’” said Taylor, sitting at the dining room table of his tidy home on Lake Murray. “I thought it might be a prank call. But then she started talking about my unit, and I knew she was real. It was just a shock.”
The call was just the latest chapter in an almost decade-long effort to learn more about the “death train” and the U.S. soldiers who liberated it.
Her path to Taylor  ran though an Upstate New York high school website, a retired soldier in Florida and, finally, one of Taylor’s Army buddies.
“I told him that I salute him for having left his family and gone to Europe to liberate the continent from the yoke of Nazi occupation,” she wrote The State in an email from her home in  Israel. “I called to thank him and told him about the story of the train. And I told him also that I extend to him my most heartfelt appreciation for helping to save my father.”
‘60,000 alive and mountains of corpses’
During the war, her grandparents and father were rounded up by the Nazis in Budapest, Hungary. In 1944, he was separated from his parents and taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwestern Germany.
Bergen-Belsen had originally been a prisoner of war camp – Stalag 11-C – for Russian soldiers. But in 1943 it was converted to house “elite” {webmaster note-not my words.}Jews from around Europe. They were to be used as bargaining chips to exchange for German prisoners and for other purposes, said Matthew Rozell, a high school history teacher from Hudson Falls, N.Y., who began doing oral histories of World War II veterans as a class project in the early 1990s. It was his class website – teachinghistorymatters.wordpress.com – that helped her on her search.
As the war progressed and the Russians began moving forward on the Eastern Front, the Nazis transferred more and more prisoners from camps in the east to Bergen-Belsen.
By 1945, “it was huge, massive,” Rozell said of the camp. “When it was liberated on April 15 by the British, they found 60,000 (people) alive and mountains of corpses. ”
Some estimates put the number of dead at the end of the war at 50,000. Still, Bergen-Belsen wasn’t considered a death camp like Auschwitz in Poland.
“They didn’t have gas chambers,” Rozell said, “but they had crematoriums because people were dropping like flies from starvation and disease.”
Six days in locked boxcars
Bergen-Belsen was located in the northwestern German province of Lower Saxony, near the town of Belsen.
As the war neared its end and the Third Reich was collapsing – with the British and Americans driving east across Germany and the Soviets closing in from the west – the Nazi regime decided to relocate many of the prisoners to a camp in Czechoslovakia. They were loaded into three trains – about 1,700 to 2,500 per train. It was a nerve-wracking experience for the prisoners.
“These people didn’t know where they were going,” Rozell said. “It was never a good idea to get on a train to places unknown.”
One train made it to the Czech camp at Theresienstadt. Another was liberated by the Russians.
But a third train – the one on which he rode – was stopped en route near the town of Farsleben, Germany, southwest of Berlin. The tracks had been bombed by the Allies, impeding the Germans’ retreat to the east.
There, the prisoners waited for six days and seven nights, packed shoulder to shoulder in locked boxcars, with little or no food and a single bucket as a toilet.
They were part of what Rozell called “the greatest crime in the history of the world – the Holocaust.”
Liberation for some, too late for others
On April 13, 1945 – Friday the 13th – some tanks rolled in and the Nazi guards ran away. It was a lucky day for some, as tattered, emaciated and utterly thankful people poured out of the cars and tried to embrace the American soldiers.
But for many others, it was simply too late. They had died in the car, and others would die in the coming days.
The American tankers were a reconnaissance element of the 743rd tank battalion. The battalion was attached to the 30th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army – the Old Hickory Division formed at Fort Jackson from soldiers recruited or drafted from the Carolinas and Tennessee.
Lt. Frank Towers was a headquarters liaison officer with the 30th Division. He saw the train first-hand and through the years penned a 32-page paper chronicling “The Death Train at Farsleben, Germany.”
“We had seen our own men killed and maimed, torn apart. We expected that. That was part of war,” said Towers, now of Gainesville, Fla. and the 30th Division’s historian. “But when we saw these people – walking skeletons, dirty, stinking, infested with lice and fleas – we didn’t want to get close to them. We didn’t know what kind of diseases they had. It was a miserable lot of people. They fell out (of the boxcars) like cordwood.”
The tankers – among them George Gross, who passed away in 2009, and Carrol “Red” Walsh, still living, who Rozell had interviewed for his class – had to move on the next day.
“We were fighting a war, not babysitting people,” Towers said.
So Towers got the job of finding transportation to take the survivors to a former Luftwaffe (German Air Force) hospital near Hillersleben, Germany. It was an 18-mile circuitous route because most of the bridges in the area had been bombed by the Allies or blown up by retreating German troops.
That’s when Taylor’s story begins.
‘The most horrible sight and smell I have ever seen’
Taylor was drafted in 1942 when he turned 21 years old. At the time, he was living in West Columbia.
He went through basic training and eventually became a litter (stretcher)-bearer with the 95th Medical Battalion.
The men of the 95th were trained to treat soldier for injuries suffered by poisonous gas. But by the time they reached Omaha Beach in Normandy 30 days after the D-Day invasion, it was apparent that poisonous gas – so deadly in World War I – would not be used in World War II.
So the 95th became a regular medical battalion, setting up aid stations behind Gen. George Patton’s Third Army as it raced across France. Taylor’s main job was to poke through bombed out buildings, looking for wounded soldiers or dead bodies, and then haul them back to the aid station for treatment or burial.
The 95th worked its way across France and Belgium, and then hooked up with the Ninth Army as it drove through Germany. It found itself in the wake of the 30th Infantry Division, operating the hospital in Hillersleben when the death train refugees started pouring in.
“When we took them off the trucks, we didn’t know if they were dead or alive,” Taylor said. “We had a tent set up in the yard for a morgue. We took their pulse and either took them to the morgue or set them up in the hospital.
“They had all urinated and (defecated) on themselves for so long. I was sick at my stomach, close to vomiting. It was the most horrible sight and smell I have ever seen, and I hope to God I never have to see that again.”
‘I was touching history’
Flash forward to 2005.
Towers met a survivor of the train living in Florida – Ernest Kan. {Kan was not on the train but liberated nearby at the Polte Ammunition Works.}He also began penning his remembrances of the incident. And then Kan came across Rozell’s website. Rozell and Towers began collaborating, locating other survivors and liberators, attempting to unite them.
{Survivor} in Israel saw Rozell’s website and called Towers to thank him.
“It was a shock to me,” she said. “Two days I did nothing; I just thought about it. I felt like I was touching history to talk to the American soldier who saved my father’s life.”
She then joined Rozell, Towers and others in locating survivors and liberators and bringing them together. She even hosted a reunion in Israel last April.
Taylor’s Army buddies were located – Walt “The Babe” Gantz of Scranton, Pa., and he told her about Taylor and two others who served in the 95th – Bob Shatz of Upstate New York and Fred Nicoletti of New Hampshire.

“Immediately, I wanted to call him,” she said of Taylor. “I felt it is my duty to talk with every soldier who was there, to thank them.”
Taylor finds that remarkable.
“Her crusade is beyond what I have words to explain,” he said.
The phone call brightened his Christmas.
Taylor stresses that he played a minor part in the death train story, and in the war, for that matter.
“I didn’t do all of that myself, you know,” he said, laughing. “I did have a little help winning that war.”
And as for those who say there wasn’t a Holocaust?
“I was there and I saw it,” Taylor said. “It was just pure hate, and I pray that we never reach anything close to it again.”
Video excerpts from reporter Jeff Wilkinson’s interview with World War II vet Grier Taylor-below-highly recommended

www.thestate.com/2012/01/29/2132112/remembering-the-death-train.html

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“Just as we were at the point of despair, two American tanks came rolling down a hill and saved us.”

Holocaust survivor recalls kindness of US troops

Another survivor of the train near Magdeburg appears. International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2012. I hope she finds her way to this site so she can meet her actual liberators! Thanks for Leslie Meisels for tipping us off to the article. Aliza’s memoir of life in the Warsaw Ghetto and beyond is very moving and can be found here.

By GIL SHEFLER 01/27/2012 00:34

JERUSALEM POST

“The American soldiers didn’t know what to do and they showered us with chocolates and cigarettes.”

Aliza Vitis-Shomron on Thursday vividly recalled her brush with death on the eve of her liberation from the Nazis in 1945.

The survivor, who spoke on a panel at the Kibbutz Yad Mordechai Holocaust Museum the day before the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, said a rumor had spread among the group of Jewish prisoners she was part of in Poland that they were about to be murdered.

Rather than surrendering them to the Allies closing in from the east and west, the prisoners feared their captors were planning to plunge their train into the Elbe River and drown everyone.

“Panic and fear spread quickly,” recalled the Polish-born Israeli who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. “Just as we were at the point of despair, two American tanks came rolling down a hill and saved us.”

The feeble Jewish prisoners emerged from the train and embraced the stunned soldiers of the US 30th Armored Division.

the tank commanders who freed her.

“We were crying with joy,” she said. “The American soldiers didn’t know what to do and they showered us with chocolates and cigarettes.”

Vitis-Shomron said she did not feel that she had defeated the Nazis.

“I did not triumph,” said Vitis-Shomron, an educator who has four great-grandchildren.

“What happened accompanies me, but I try to live and live well. I try to teach humanitarian values to our youths. We must never do upon others what was done to us.”

The panel Vitis-Shomron was part of at Yad Mordechai, the kibbutz named after the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Mordechai Anielewicz), included Simcha “Kojak” Rotem, who fought in the uprising, and former defense minister Moshe Arens.

It was one of many events held in Israel and around the world commemorating the remembrance day.

On Wednesday, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor, American Jewish Committee Executive Director David Harris and members of the newly formed World Forum of Russian Jewry met at United Nations headquarters to honor the memory of those killed by the Nazis.

The AJC head said the lesson learned from the murder of six million Jews required the world to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capabilities.

“This past September, indeed on these grounds, the notorious Holocaust denier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke,” Harris said. “To their credit, several UN member ambassadors walked out, but, shamefully, the majority stayed in the General Assembly hall and applauded his remarks.”

The president of the World Forum of Russian Jewry, Ukrainian businessman Alexander Levin, joined the call urging the UN to take action against the Islamic Republic.

More Holocaust memorial events are planned for Israel and around the world on Friday.

Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and ambassadors from more than a dozen countries including Germany, the US, Egypt and the Philippines are set to gather at the Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak near Netanya to take part in a memorial ceremony.

The UN designated January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005. It is marked by governments and organizations around the world.

Israel, however, observes its official Holocaust Remembrance Day on the 26th of Nissan, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, according to the Jewish calendar. Its selection reflects the Jewish state’s preference to emphasize Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=255355

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Quotes from American Soldiers/Holocaust Survivors Reunion 9/22-26/09

Quotes from American Soldiers/Holocaust Survivors Reunion   9/22-26/09

Compiled by Mrs. Hales, English teacher, Hudson Falls High School.

You are free to share or use this page, provided the following conditions are met:

• Attribution — You must attribute the work. That means you need to credit me, even if you are a student working on a last minute paper for your history teacher at 2am, searching for that killer quote. Your teacher will be impressed; otherwise, he or she will go online and find the quote the same way you did, and let you have it for stealing. So I’ll make it easy: Rozell, Matthew. Quotes from the American Soldiers/Holocaust Survivors Reunion, Hudson Falls High School, New York, USA;   9/22-9/26/2009. World War II Living History Project/Teaching History Matters http://teachinghistorymatters.wordpress.com. Accessed (you fill in the blank with a date here).
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Credit Matthew Rozell and World War II Living History Project/Teaching History Matters. .. If re-posting  include the link, http://teachinghistorymatters.wordpress.com.

• “How could we [the world] have stood by and let that happen to them?  We owe them.”   Carrol Walsh, 743^rd Tank Battalion, Liberator
• “I often wonder what this world would be like if those 6 million had never perished.”  Frank Towers, 30^th Infantry Division, Liberator
• “Against all odds I am standing here before you.”  Steven Barry, Holocaust Survivor, (Hungary, Florida)
• “I tell my story so that they might tell the next generation.”  Sara Atzmon, Holocaust Survivor, artist, (Hungary, Israel)
• “Love gives us wings to soar above it all.”  Sara Atzmon, Holocaust Survivor, artist, (Hungary, Israel)
• “Hatred is something we must fight against.”  Leslie Meisels, Holocaust Survivor, (Hungary, Toronto)
• “Silence helps the oppressors.” Leslie Meisels, Holocaust Survivor, (Hungary, Toronto)
• “I tell my story so that it won’t become your future.”  Leslie Meisels, Holocaust Survivor, (Hungary, Toronto)
• “We cannot be lax at all.  We must keep the faith.  We must tell others.”  Buster Simmons, Chaplain, 30^th Infantry Division Veterans of WWII.
• “I’m listed as a liberator, but I’m a survivor of WWII.”  William Gast, 743^rd Tank Battalion
• “We keep the faith.”  Motto of the 743^rd Tank Battalion
• “Freedom is not free; there is a high price tag attached.”  William Gast, 743^rd Tank Battalion
• “We must ever be thankful [for our freedom].  We must NEVER take freedom for granted.”  William Gast, 743^rd Tank Battalion
• “After they gave us back our lives, we needed to live each day.”  Paul Arato, Holocaust Survivor, (Hungary;  Toronto, Canada)
• “I live some of the horrors of 65 years ago everyday.”  Paul Arato, Holocaust Survivor, (Hungary;  Toronto, Canada)
• “You have the power to heal the world.”  Lev Raphael, son of Holocaust survivors
• “Don’t be a bystander.”  Mr. Rozell, see below.

Credit Matthew Rozell and World War II Living History Project/Teaching History Matters. .. If re-posting  include the link, http://teachinghistorymatters.wordpress.com.

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