"for the sake of humanity"… A small town American high school history project changes lives worldwide. These are the observations of a veteran teacher- on the Power of Teaching, the importance of the study of History, and especially the lessons we must learn, and teach, on the Holocaust. Click on "Holocaust Survivors, Liberators Reunited" tab above to begin.
Liberation site, 13 April 2024. Photo by Daniel Keweloh. Note the visitation remembrance stones on the memorial.
April, 1945. Testimony of 17 year old Hungarian survivor Irene Bleier.
“In front of the cattle car, we could see German civilians from the two nearby towns running in opposite directions on the main road, trying to escape from the approaching US forces. With dulled sense, we glimpsed towards them. Several SS guards stayed with us. Some of them asked for—and received—civilian clothes from our people.
The next morning we dug up recently planted potatoes we found, made a fire, and cooked them. They tasted delicious. I again started walking towards the small pond, but then Jolan excitedly hollered to me: ‘Hey you, come back fast, the US Army has arrived!’
As much as my faint condition would allow me, I hurried to the scene of the miracle to welcome them, this being the big moment we so yearned for. Two angel-like American soldiers stood there beside their magic jeep. My sister and I looked on enchanted as they took captive the several SS cowards who stayed in their shameful and disgraceful uniforms. The SS henchmen held up their hands while one of the Americans stood opposite them with a pointed weapon. Then, the second US soldier searched their pockets.
Standing there and looking up at our liberators, I waited to sense some kind of emotion on this miraculous occasion—but no. Reality did not penetrate my consciousness. My senses were incapable of experiencing any signs of emotion; I had no tears of joy that appeared, nor even the slightest smile. My senses were left stiff, in the aftermath of extended suffering. We are liberated, but only outwardly. Our mind still remained under great pressure, as heavy, dark clouds obscured our world of comprehension. It will take a good many years to be free completely. When that time comes, if ever, we will be able to feel wholly liberated and shake off the shackles of bondage and imperceptible suffering. The majority of our group was so feeble that they stayed inside the crowded cattle cars. Some ventured to the nearby small towns for provisions. The following day, early in the afternoon, the US Army arrived with a big army truck. They brought us a delicious hot meal, potato goulash with veal meat. Never before in my life, or after, did I eat as tasty a meal as this. I just looked on as those US soldiers of valor took care of our group of two thousand, going from cattle car to cattle car so patiently. After suffering so long from inhuman treatment, I felt a great distinction to be treated with human kindness by those American soldiers. It was like being born again.
With their kind devotion toward us they sowed back into our souls the sparks and seeds of human hopes and feelings. By Sunday morning, my sister Jolan and I plucked up some courage and crawled out of the cattle cars to look around at the nearby town of Farsleben. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that US soldiers were already patrolling the locality. Some of our fellow Jews were also around and about. The local population either locked themselves in their homes or escaped. None of them ventured to welcome the new liberators.”
Today I am thinking of all my survivor families and friends, including those of the soldiers, who have now all pretty much left us. Last April on this day, I spoke to cadets at the USMA at West Point, officers in training about to go out into the world, about the actions of their forebearers across the generations at a place called Farsleben, Germany, honored to be there with the commanding general at my table.
Mike, Laura, Lee, and I then flew to Israel for a multi-day tour, interviewing a dozen or so survivors of the train and their families, thanks to our friend Varda W.
In June, the film crew made it up to Hudson Falls and the homestead to get more interviews.
In July, we discovered the lost footage of the train liberation shot on April 14, 1945 by the US Signal Corps. The discovery went ‘viral’ and has been viewed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times.
In October, we toured the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and interviewed historians and archivists who watched the story unfold, and gave their input for the film. We also talked to the United States’ Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues at the State Department. We know they appreciated this story, and we appreciate their interest and commitment, as it to no less than 60 communications to navigate and set up our interview.
Leaving Washington the afternoon of October 7, it became clear over the next few weeks that things had changed. The sheer horror and scale of the massacre and violence was dumbfounding as its scope became clear, on an unprecedented scale, since the Holocaust. The calculated evil that rolled through that morning and almost immediately elicited support in some cities in the west remains profoundly disturbing.
But today, as the world goes about its destructive business, a quiet ceremony took place at the liberation site in Farsleben, Germany, with committed locals and 2nd Gen survivors. My friend from Hillersleben Daniel K. took some photos. A beautiful April day, liberation day and today.
I spoke to attentive 10th graders this week, bringing them the message of what the soldiers did. We remember.
We hope to return next year for the 80th anniversary with the completed film, for more people to learn from, when the liberation anniversary appropriately falls on Passover.
A bit sad to announce we closed the physical bookshop this month at the Glens Falls Shirt Factory on the third floor. We just don’t have the bandwidth (i.e. my physical presence in two places); originally it was a father-daughter venture, with the youngest having a photo studio there too, but she moved to Troy to continue her education/career. And my butt needs to be in the chair at home working on new titles. I hope to be back there with a booth for the holidays and a new title or two. It’s nice to interact with the fans!
photo: Gretta Hochsprung 2020
At home, my wife and I worked really hard getting books packed and shipped for the latest holiday rush; between mid November and Christmas we gained at least 2500 new readers. Then we took our annual retreat to start the next book in the series, Vol. 10, China/Burma/India, and work on the third eight-hundred page omnibus book. I think that cover came out pretty good! It will be available in a few weeks, or you can look for it at Amazon here.
Around the beginning of this month we crossed over 25,000 orders on the direct to consumer store [link below] we opened 44 months ago, or 3.75 years, around Memorial Day, 2020. Many of them are now long time subscribers; we have about the same number for followers on our official Facebook page. So thank you for that. And virtually no complaints/returns [well, maybe literally a handful from the occasional husband who admits being too lazy to open the books his wife got him for a gift!]. That tells me we are scratching an itch, and someday I will post the comments and conversations that turn into message boards that appear on some of my feeds I see online.
Today by chance in an audio shuffle, I’m listening to history podcaster Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History episodes on the War in the Pacific, “Supernova in the East”. It’s very long and involved but it is very good. And a former student tipped me off that Dan quotes from my first book in it [about an hour twenty-five minutes into this one]! I hope Dan gets a chance to pick up the other (nine)!
This week I’ll also get to preview a working draft of Mike Edwards’ film on my book, and 1/3 of my life. It will be Episode One, of four parts. And I’ll get to see it with Mike, my family and some others, the screenwriter Lee Shackleford and key film making participants Josh Fronduti and Chris Martin, all coming hundreds of miles to screen it for us for the first time.
And, timely enough, I have heard from another second generation survivor (daughter) who saw her father’s moving image on the day after he was liberated. I’m honored and welcome to share her astonishment and greetings, below.
Suffice it to say, the miracles just keep coming.
From NARA: “Summary: Numerous scenes, freed Jewish prisoners in groups along railroad tracks. Their expressions furnish a clue to the suffering they endured. Individual shots: Men, women, and children, some of them in various stages of emaciation. Flashes of US soldiers distributing food. The group surrounding the soldiers push forward to receive meager bits of food. LS, village being shelled by German artillery from across the Elbe River.”
“Hello, Dr. Matt Rozell,
I have the honor to write to you after my efforts to reach your address by Mr. Jakob Barzilay from Raanana and Mis. Varda Weisskopf .
On July 31, 2023, Channel 12 of the Israeli television broadcasted the video that was found in the basement of the archives of the Holocaust Museum in Washington after for 78 years without anyone knowing about it, which I understand was thanks to your investigation.
When I watched the video I was immediately flooded with calls from my children, my brother and nephews who all couldn’t believe their eyes. Our father (their grandfather) appears clearly in the video.
After watching the video at least five times and rubbing our eyes, we opened the booklet in which our children wrote on 1986 the family roots when they were 14 years old. We found the literal description of the valley where the train stopped, with a hill covered with trees on the one side and a lower hill with green spring grass on the other one.
The name of my father is Michael Sonnenshein, born on 1909 in Verebly. His name appears in the list of the Bergen-Barzan release book – “NAMES” (Jewish victims of Hungarian labour battalions).
I am attaching here: 1. His name from the book; 2. A photo of my father which was taken after the War for the purpose of identification in the video; 3. A section from the video, where you see my father removing his hat in front of the photographer.
Michael Sonnenshein.
I would like very much to get in touch with you and learn more about the story of the train.
A quick note to my followers here that I do have a new book out. It is the 9th volume in the Things Our Fathers Saw series, and it’s finally about the Homefront and the women (I guess what our mothers saw!). I will leave you with a synopsis and a link below, or you can head to the Shop tab on this site.
I also wanted to let you know that if you are somewhat local to the Glens Falls area, I will be holding my holiday Meet the Author book tour at my shop in the Shirt Factory. The hours are posted in the graphic above.
In VOLUME 9 of The Things Our Fathers Saw® series, ‘Homefront/Women At War’, we will take an often-overlooked view of the story of World War II. You will visit with the people on the homefront, from schoolkids navigating growing up during the Great Depression and the War, to the women on the factory floor and the armed services, newly independent but having to fight for their rights and later, their jobs, laying the seeds of societal change for the future. You will meet war brides on the ships’ decks over the Atlantic, and follow the challenges they faced growing up in a Europe at war, meeting their GIs, and then starting new families in a new environment. Lastly, you will sit down with the displaced children of World War II who struggled to survive as totalitarian thugs marched into and upended their worlds for years to come, but who survived to tell their personal tales of suffering, and express their gratitude, to young Americans who took the time to listen to them.
“If it had not been for the women going out the door, there would have been no spring in 1944.”
I’m still processing the horrific attack on Israel, as we all are. Our scriptwriter and webmaster for the film A Train Near Magdeburg wrote a beautiful post that I would like to share below. We, as American Gentiles, stand with Israel, as President Harry Truman did fourteen minutes after the Jewish state was proclaimed in May 1948. Thank you Lee Shackleford.
November 1, 2023
We do have news about the film, but for the moment horror and fear take precedence as terrorists invade, assault, and rain death down on innocents in Israel.
If you’ve read all our other posts here, you know that our team is especially close to some people who make homes in Israel. So you’ll be relieved to hear that at the time I write this, we have heard that Ellen Haber, Naomi Vilko, Galia Hartmann, and Varda Weisskopf are all safe and well. And for this we give thanks. We are eager to hear from more!
Our friend Lynn Perlgut Kra-Oz (who has lived in Israel for 44 years) sent us a passionate and eloquent report of what it has been like to live in this nightmare. And it closed with a poetic suggestion that brought tears to my eyes. Instead of the photo of burning buildings that I’d previously posted here, she offered this:
“Ellen (lifelong friend Ellen Haber) has suggested that I send a photo that you may want to use … it a photo taken in the center of Tel Aviv this past Friday, next to the Tel Aviv Museum. It is a table set up for the Sabbath with an empty seat to honor every hostage still held by the Hamas terrorists. My sister in law (who lives in Tel Aviv) took the photo. She said she would be happy if you used it.”
And here it is.
Our team is made up of American Gentiles. Sometimes when people learn this, they ask, “Why are you so passionate about making this movie? You’re not Jews!”
We’re human beings. We are people of love and compassion who abhor violence and who know, if only through our study of history, that this new war is another chapter in the seemingly-endless story of the persecution of Jews. “How long, oh Lord?” the Psalmist cries, and we echo his plea.
One of our goals for this movie is –and always has been– to demonstrate to the world, to all who see the film, that great and good things come from compassion, from sharing, from putting oneself at risk for the sake of others who cannot care for themselves.
In a way, that’s the whole miracle of what happened in April 1945 just north of Magdeburg: people trained for violence turned their energies to rescue, to healing, to … well, let’s just say the word: love. And the result was the freedom and healing of 2,500 human beings and the opportunity for them to bring into the world children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Our hearts are with all who suffer today. Meanwhile we hold fast to our conviction that the Jews of Israel will survive.
I recently had a chance to re-connect with a researcher from my days in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum fellowship program fifteen years ago. Filmmaker Mike Edwards and I and my wife Laura traveled to Washington, DC to speak with Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues Ellen Germain at the State Department, and the next day, we had a behind the scenes interview with my friend Steven Vitto in the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center.
In 2016, we interviewed Walter Gantz at his home in Scranton, PA, for the film. In the interview, he mentioned a traumatic event that stayed with him all these years.
The ‘casino’ at Hillersleben. Ervin Abadi. Completed at Hillersleben DP camp, May, 1945. Soldier Monroe Williams collection. Note Red Cross tents in foreground. May have served as temporary morgue station.
Walter, then the 21 yr old us Army medic, recalled the night 15 year old Eva Klein died. He carried her to the morgue tent, and she was then buried in a mass grave, 10 days after liberation…
“We talk about nightmares and flashbacks. I never had any nightmares where I would scream, but there are two so-called flashbacks I remember and they stayed with me for many, many years. [In the second] incident, I used to work a twelve-hour shift, from eight in the evening to eight in the morning. In the wee hours of the morning, this young girl died. For some reason, I wrapped her up in a blanket and I carried her down the stairs and I was crying.
We had a war tent that was used as a makeshift morgue. I placed her in there. I wonder why I would do that; I must have liked her for some reason. I didn’t have to do that, because we had a team that took care to those who died, and placed them in the morgue.
I spent seven weeks with these people. Most of us spent seven weeks and during our so-called watch, 106 people died… God, it was tough. [This girl] was actually fifteen years old. Her name was Eva Klein and you might say, ‘How was it possible that he could carry her?’ She probably weighed 60 pounds, maybe. I thought about that many times, and I must have been attracted to her for some reason. That haunted me, really. It really haunted me.”
Steven tells me today that we have had over 150 correspondences since 2008 when I first approached his desk, mainly with him doing the deep dives into the documentation archives that opened up since that date. In 2016, at my request, he began to follow the documentation of Eva and her family, survivors desperate to get out of the DP camps. An American soldier compiled a list of the dead in the Hillersleben mass cemetery grave, including Eva, anxious that it not be lost as the Americans pull out due to planned post Yalta Soviet occupation. It is that 1945 list that preserved the names of those buried in Hillersleben, as evidenced by the plaque we found there when we visited in 2022.
A plea to preserve the list of names of those who perished at Hillersleben after liberation and who had to be buried in an improvised mass grave.Eva’s name on a list unearthed by Steven, with her family, entry to camp Bergen Belsen.Probably Eva’s brother, application for resettlement.Probably Eva’s sister, application for resettlement.
Thanks to the efforts of Steven Vitto, we are going to try to find surviving family members, who would probably like to learn of the medic who cared so deeply for this girl.
Later, back at the hotel, we had a chance to debrief our journey a bit with the director. To go from being educators with, in retrospect, little background knowledge of the Holocaust, to growing and learning and traveling the world to the authentic sites, and being welcomed into survivors homes, and to share in the joy of reuniting and reconnecting people across time and space, and being reminded on this trip of the many supporters and kindred souls along our journey, has been a life changing experience. Look for the film in 2025!
Most recent article update. Seven survivors or their families have come forward to say they see themselves and or their families in this miracle footage. The footage has now been seen over 100K times at my YouTube channel, and probably millions of times at the worldwide newspaper/media coverage.You can subscribe there for updates if you wish.
Will Waldron Times Union
Matthew Rozell has spent decades preserving oral testimonies of veterans and Holocaust survivors, especially the memories of 2,500 people rescued from a Nazi death train at the end of the war
Patrick Tine/Albany Times Union
Sep. 3, 2023
History teacher Matthew Rozell looks over film footage of WWII concentration camp survivors that was recently discovered in the National Archive on Aug. 24 in Glens Falls.
On Friday, April 13, 1945, Sgt. Carrol “Red” Walsh, assigned to D Company of the 743rd Tank Battalion, was steeling himself for the planned assault on the strategically important German city of Magdeburg on the Elbe River.
Word of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death the day before had just reached the front lines, punctuating a harrowing 10 months of near-ceaseless combat. His battalion, which was attached to the 30th Infantry Division, had landed at Normandy a month after D-Day in July 1944. They had held off the German counteroffensive at Mortain, were among the first Allied troops in Belgium and Netherlands and had nearly frozen to death during some of the most punishing engagements of the entire war during the Battle of the Bulge.
Before the operation to take the city, Maj. Clarence Benjamin ordered Walsh and another soldier to get in their tanks and follow his Jeep. They needed to investigate a train stopped in a ravine a few miles away in the tiny village of Farsleben.
Twenty-five hundred Jewish men, women and children from across Europe who had been deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were aboard the train. Those with the strength to disembark were making their way up the embankment. Maj. Benjamin snapped a photo that encapsulated the range of emotions the now-former prisoners were feeling. A terrified mother and daughter in the foreground, fearful after years of captivity that there were further horrors to come, and a gaunt woman in the background, dazed but smiling at the realization that liberation was finally at hand.
Survivors rest on the embankment are seen next to the stopped train in Farsleben. /
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
The events of that day became part of the life’s work of Matthew Rozell, a retired Hudson Falls history teacher who has been compiling the oral histories of the people on that train and the men who liberated them.
Rozell recounts the events that became known as the “Miracle at Farsleben” in minute detail, from memory and with no notes. He does not need them.
Missing from Rozell’s voluminous records and testimonies about the train liberation was any footage of the events. Rozell knew the U.S. Army Signal Corps had been at Farsleben filming but in years of research neither he nor seemingly any other historian or Holocaust filmmaker had found any footage.
Then, an assistant from the small museum in Farsleben got in touch two months ago. He had seen a snippet of the train liberation in a documentary that had recently aired on German television.
“(The assistant) said ‘I don’t know if this is the Farsleben train,’” Rozell said. “I looked at it and said ‘That’s the train.’” Other than the survivors and liberators, no one would know better than Rozell.
He got a record number from the National Archives and Records Administration and was able to track the video down. Rozell put it on YouTube where it has been viewed nearly 100,000 times.
Work started decades ago
It is a fitting, final piece to a project that began more than 30 years ago.
From an office at the Shirt Factory in Glens Falls where books of his oral histories and old newspapers spanning the length of the war line the room, Rozell explained how the project began in 1991 when he asked his class, by show of hands, how many of their grandparents had served in World War II or Korea.
“Every kid in the classroom raised both hands,” Rozell said.
Conversations between students and their relatives turned into tape-recorded class visits by veterans, which students dutifully transcribed on early word processors from VHS tape. One of his students was the grandson of Carroll “Red” Walsh, the private who went on to a career as a New York state Supreme Court judge after the war. Walsh was from Johnstown and a graduate of Albany Law School. He died in 2012.
Rozell starting doing interviews during the summer and began posting testimonies and photographs on a website hosted by the school. To his surprise, he found out that professional historians were directing survivors, who were children at the time, to his website.
“I had no idea until I got an email from a grandmother in Australia,” Rozell said. “I heard from a professor of physics at Brooklyn College who was a 6-year-old Jewish boy on the train. I heard from a retired Israeli airline executive in New Jersey who had been a 13-year-old German Jew on the train. I heard from a doctor in London who had been a 6-year-old Hungarian boy on the train.”
A woman and two children rest next to the stopped train, the day after it was liberated on April 14, 1945. /United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
Survivors journeyed to Hudson Falls in 2009 to meet the man who had become a keeper of their shared memory and the soldiers who rescued them.
The gathering was joyous.
Recounting misery and freedom
They also recounted the misery they endured. The group, which included about 500 children, had been forced onto the train at Bergen-Belsen in northwestern Germany and sent southeast toward Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in an attempt to outrun the Americans and the Soviets. Certain death either from either rampant disease (Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, had died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen weeks earlier) or execution by the SS awaited them.
But the SS men abandoned the train at Farsleben after hearing American armor was in the area, Rozell recounted. The engineer decoupled his locomotive from the train and disappeared. At gunpoint, American GIs ordered the townspeople to house the freed prisoners. Bakeries were opened and cattle were slaughtered to feed them.
Rozell, for his part, received enormous acclaim for his work. He was highlighted as an “ABC World News” person of the week and got a teaching fellowship from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
He’s working on a documentary now with British broadcaster ITV. It is scheduled to air in late 2024.
Until then Rozell’s website, books, and his indefatigable memory will stand as the vital and timeless repository for this miracle at the end of the war.
Newly discovered US Army footage of the Train Near Magdeburg surfaces after 78 years.
‘Three Cheers For America.’ Note numbers on car, Car #16 out of 52. Colorized still from newly discovered film.
American soldier handing out food, backing up as starving people swarm him. Colorized still from newly discovered film.
If you are coming to this website cold, as a public high school history teacher, 22 summers ago I sat down with an 80 year old WWII veteran, initially reluctant to tell his story, and almost forgetting to tell this part of it, but eventually, the following came out.
In the closing days of the war, fighting across central Germany, he and another tank commander came across a train stalled by the tracks with desperate people milling about. They were 2500 Holocaust victims from Bergen-Belsen. And they needed immediate help. Their major and one of the tank commanders had a camera. After my interviews with them, they gave me permission to place the photos on the school website.
Farsleben train, moment of liberation, Friday the 13th of April,1945. Two American tank commanders and their major in a jeep liberate the train. Major Benjamin snaps the photo.
Four years ticked by. Then I heard from a grandmother in Australia who had been a seven-year old girl on the train. Others followed. I was able to re-unite the liberators with the people and the families they saved as young men. Over eleven reunions on three continents took place. So now, twenty-two years after our initial interview, this footage of the event appears in my life.
Another miracle in a story of miracles. And this one is HUGE.
A contact in Germany, Susanne at the museum in Wolmirstedt near the Farsleben, Germany liberation site outside of the city of Magdeburg on the Elbe River, recently emailed to say that she had seen part of a German documentary that included footage of people milling about a long train transport, and US Army soldiers helping, dispensing food and the like. She wondered if it was our train. Having been to the liberation site in person, and studying this story for decades, I was sure from the five seconds or so of a liberated train I watched that it was indeed our train.
Our team led by Mike Edwards inquired at the National Archives and just four weeks later, they sent the following footage to us. Of course, it had been filmed by the US Army Signal Corps in the aftermath of the Friday the 13th of April 1945 liberation, when our tankers of the 743rd came upon the train.
Newly discovered US Army footage of Farsleben train, April 1945. National Archives, public domain.NARA photo of film reel can.
US SIGNAL CORPS footage reel dated 4.17.1945, in the immediate aftermath of the train’s liberation by the 743 Tank Battalion and 30th Infantry Division. No sound. From NARA: “Summary: Numerous scenes, freed Jewish prisoners in groups along railroad tracks. Their expressions furnish a clue to the suffering they endured. Individual shots: Men, women, and children, some of them in various stages of emaciation. Flashes of US soldiers distributing food. The group surrounding the soldiers push forward to receive meager bits of food. LS, village being shelled by German artillery from across the Elbe River.”
My best guess is that it was taken on Saturday 4.14.45, given the other US Signal Corps photographs from that day. What is fantastic is that this footage gives us a better perspective on liberation and its aftermath. Poignant and moving scenes: men crushing lice in their clothing. Families sprawled out, resting in the mid-April sunshine. Crowds swarming a soldier distributing food, bring to mind the Chuck Kincaid letter dated April 17, in which he expresses shock and horror at what he was seeing. A father holding his young daughter up so she can witness, and also put her hand out with the others. People in obvious distress, some likely very sick, some so exhausted they can hardly make an expression for the cameraman. The unsmiling little boy in hat, looking into the camera. The European script writing, numbering the cars, 52 of them, on the side of one of the cars; my guess is that it was done at Bergen-Belsen as they loaded the cars. And, of course, the beautiful American soldiers, trying to distribute food. Just who are they?
Red Walsh and George Gross and their tanks had departed for the final battle by the time of the Signal Corps arrival. Frank Towers was there, in and out that day, and medic Walter Gantz remembered being there that day.
I have been asked how I feel about this, surfacing 22 years to the day of my original interview with Red Walsh. With many of the stills, we have an entirely new portfolio of pictures to go through. We have already made one positive identification: the family of poet Yaakov Barzilai writes to confirm that he is visible in the footage, along with Yaakov’s mother and sister.
Top to bottom, in circle: Yaakov Barzilai, his sister Yehudit, his mother Iren, seated.Yaakov and author this spring in Israel.
So if you are a person who follows my blog from the early days, you know that not just is this an astounding development, but also one that confirms again that the past still has secrets to reveal, that in contextualizing the photos and film into the story of the Train Near Magdeburg, more healing is already taking place in our mission to ‘repair the world’. [And if you can see yourself, your family, or recognize any of the people, reach out to me here in the comments, or drop a line to matthew@matthewrozellbooks.com.]
A boy after liberation.
So, how does this make me FEEL? Frankly, it is immensely gratifying, though even without this footage, this is an incredible story. But to actually see the newly discovered film is another nail in the coffin of Holocaust denial. The soldiers didn’t lie. They WITNESSED it with their own eyes, and suffered the consequences themselves.
I cannot say that I am entirely shocked or stunned at this amazing development, because, as I told my wife, this is larger than any of us. We are part of a cosmic, maybe holy process, a process of the unfolding of the ‘so many miracles’ of this story. I’m sad that my four soldier friends mentioned above and all my survivor friends who have also now passed, are not with us to see it, to comment on it, to share in it with me and the living survivors and their families. But I am grateful to be able to live it now, and I am proud that those twenty-two years ago I had the audacity to want to have a conversation with a reluctant World War II veteran, and the curiosity to pause and take note of what he revealed upon his daughter’s prompting, to begin what would become this never-ending journey to help heal the world, and now with a team dedicated to telling this story to the world on film. It is with an undying sense of Wonder that we get to witness yet again the Power of LOVE transcending Time and Space. Of the GOOD countering the evil.
Seventy-eight years vanishes in an instant. This project is a portal, evidenced many times over. So I’m proud of it, but also humbled by it. And I’m humbled by all the people all over the world who have also come believe in it, and champion the message, and healing the world with their own love and compassion. This is larger than all of us.
Below you will find a gallery of stills of the train and the people captured on that film 78 years ago, which I derived/created this weekend from the public domain film, and also added some color to, to highlight the scenes. [Tap the thumbnails for the information icon with my labels/captions; please write for permission if you wish to use any of them.] And don’t forget to write or comment below if you recognize someone!
I finally got to visit the resting place of the man who, in a miracle of many miracles of the story of The Train Near Magdeburg, changed the trajectory of my life, over the two decades after he reluctantly entered it. He was not crazy about sitting down with a high school history teacher he did not even know, to tell his World War II story. It took coaxing from his son-in-law, his daughter, and also ultimately the fact that his grandson was enrolled via a computer printout sheet into my classroom.
‘A Visit with an Old Friend’. Mike Edwards photo, June, 2023.
Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh was laid to rest here in the foothills of the Adirondacks in Johnstown, NY in the early summer of 2013. It was he, a now retired NYS Supreme Court justice, who first told me the story of the train, at the prompting of his daughter Elizabeth at her home in Hudson Falls exactly a dozen years before, when I was 40. He was eighty, sitting in a rocking chair, telling stories with a relish. But he had almost forgotten about the incident when his tank and another came upon the train of 2500 Jewish victims of the Holocaust, a transport from Bergen-Belsen that had become a death train, but that was now the transport that led to life, with the chance encounter with these American forces near the Elbe River on Friday, the 13th of April, 1945.
“There we were, driving across central Germany, a beautiful April day, when we came across a train, a long string of boxcars…. and what are we going to do, with all these people? They need help…”
“You should talk to my friend George Gross. He was in the second tank, and he had a camera…”
So I did. Dr. Gross, former professor of English literature, was honored and eager to help a fellow educator. He gave me the narrative he wrote up, his tank having stayed with the train for 24 hours after Walsh’s tank rushed to join the column heading towards the pivotal final battle at the city of Magdeburg, which refused to surrender, a dozen miles away. He also had a camera, and recorded a dozen or so shots. He also gave me the dramatic moment of liberation photo taken by the major as the tanks and the major’s jeep pulled up to the train in the initial moment of investigation, which turned out to be the precise moment of salvation and liberation. I posted them on my school website, which displayed the stories of the World War II veterans I had interviewed 50 plus years after war’s end. And they sat there: the ‘hit counter’ I had installed averaged 25 pings on a good day.
For years.
Time marched on. Students came and went. My family got bigger. And my parents were now gone. And I know I was in the middle of a deep depression after that, triggered by losing my mom at the relatively young age of 72 on All Souls Day in November, 2005, after years of the cruelty of early onset cognitive decline. There were flickers of mother Mary’s delightful self, and her eyes shone with love in those difficult years, but really, the pain in my heart just expanded every time I saw her. So as my visits to the nursing home dwindled, my guilt compounded. How could God be so cruel to this woman who devoted her life advocating for the powerless against ‘the powers that be’? I didn’t get it; I was so angry it was eating me alive; I was in an accumulating fog of rage. I got counselling, but I was still royally, royally enraged.
I trudged through that winter. I went through the motions of life, which became a chore. I ran away to the woods to work on a cabin to distract my thoughts, but I trudged through my days. To boot, I have also always been affected by this black dog labelled ‘seasonal affective disorder’, which generally strikes hardest in late February and most of March, when I seem to historically reach my lowest point, coming off the long northern winters that never seem to end.
Which also happens to be my birth month.
In retrospect, in the first quarter of 2006, despite the joys of being a much-loved husband and father and almost-worshipped educator and all that, I was just lost. And there’s a huge amount of guilt in feeling that, knowing you are blessed with all the former, and still feeling like you are simply okay with not being on the planet.
Just what was the point? I just wasn’t getting it anymore.
But this is what happened next.
Four years after that I posted the photos, six months after my mother had passed, and right around my 45th birthday, I turned to my computer as I was giving an exam, to check my email. It was early afternoon, and a ‘Lexie’ person in Australia had pinged me.
She wanted to tell me that she had been a seven-year old Dutch girl on the train.
She wanted to tell me that thanks to me, my school website, my posting of the narratives and photographs, she had found George Gross, and worked up the courage to call him out of the blue. They both had a cry. And now she wanted me to please send her a disc with the photos of the day of her liberation.
I was stunned. A tear ran down my cheek. I looked out of the corner of my eye. Good, the kids are still working on the test, no one looking this way.
Just what was this?
The following November―literally on the eve of the first anniversary of Mom’s death―I got another email from a professor of physics at Brooklyn College. He had been a six-year old Polish boy with his mother on the train. He too, wished to thank me, and even suggested that we should all get together, since by now we knew of three persons who had been liberated, and of course, the still living tank commanders.
The following April the deal was sealed when a retired El Al airline executive in New Jersey reached out to me, having been pointed to my website by a friend who saw it. He mentioned that he spoke to schoolchildren about his experiences as a German boy during the Holocaust. He was thirteen when he was liberated by those tank commanders and those soldiers.
Hmm, I began to think… why not? I plotted a mini-reunion at our high school for the second week of school, in September, 2007, before Red Walsh and his wife Dorothy would head to Florida for the winter. Ever since nearly freezing to death in a tank during the Battle of the Bulge, he just could not stand the cold. Carrol was curious, of course. He didn’t want honors and accolades, but he wanted to meet these men. A doctor from London who had been a six-year-old Hungarian child on the train would round out the gathering, also coming up to Hudson Falls, and meet Red for the first time in front of the high school students.
We started planning over the summer with a supportive school administration, and help from teachers and staff members. I knew a guy at the Associated Press out of Albany who had a keen interest in military type stories. He came up the day before to meet Walsh in my classroom as he told stories and bantered with my 10th graders. (Sixteen years later―three days ago―I found the pristine original Hi-8 recording of this in my archives at home stored in a closet area under the stairs, ha ha! Another miracle!)
His photographer snapped away. The reporter posted the story in the morning on Friday, September 14th, just as Walsh was greeting his new survivor friends with, ‘Long time, no see!’
They gave their testimonies that afternoon to the students, who thundered them with applause. It was another miracle, that this twenty-four year old exhausted soldier got to see the results of his actions sixty-two years later.
After our goodbyes, on Saturday I headed out to the big box store to buy a new desktop computer. The salesman, doing his job, tried to upsell me a monitor. He pressed the ‘on’ button. The screen flickered to life. And there, on the Yahoo! news page which was the monitor’s default homepage, my classroom came roaring into view.
There was Red, telling his stories to my students. The entire world now knew of our reunion. The trajectory of this story was about to take off. My life was going to change.
Before the weekend was out, the school servers had crashed from traffic trying to download the liberation pictures. I heard from 60 more survivors of the train, some of whom I would become very close to. I heard from Frank Towers, the soldier tasked with moving the people out of harm’s way. I heard from the people at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who asked me to apply to their prestigious Teacher Fellowship Program. I did. I was accepted, and we planned another reunion two years later that was even bigger, that would land us as the ABC World News Persons of the Week on September 25, 2009.
Two years after that, we did a final reunion at our high school. Frank and I worked together on ten other reunions in the States, and survivor’s daughter Varda Weisskopf in Israel engineered a reunion there with Frank and perhaps 55 survivors. To date, nearly 300 survivors have been located from the train―or, maybe more telling, several have found us.
With film director Mike Edwards and crew I have gotten to retrace Red’s journey, from Normandy, through France, and on to the liberation site in Germany. We got to Israel again to interview a dozen more survivors, with Varda’s invaluable help. I’ve gotten to see firsthand the miracles of this story playing out in the modern world. And now I am again unpacking the story, that I have learned over these years that just never has an ending. And as we will try to let the world know, the message of the film is one of hope.
It’s the story of the power of love, conquering time and space.
A portal opened a crack that warm afternoon on Coleman Avenue in Hudson Falls, and I stuck my foot in before it closed back up, and I went through the door. Sometimes the room went dark for a time. Sometimes a long time. But a sliver of light always appeared at the darkest times, beckoning me to push open to another corridor, another room with more doors, another pathway. It is the ebb and flow of the cosmos. Of life. And it’s never-ending.
This is what I am learning, after twenty-two years.
I remember at that time in 2013 being upset at not being able to be at Red’s grave as the family, first and second generation survivors, and a fellow teacher representing in my stead laid him to rest (thanks Tara). But guess where I was that day? At the Bergen-Belsen Memorial in Germany, where I got to lead 20 other teachers in the Mourner’s Kaddish at the House of Remembrance. How unscripted. But how fitting.
“I think in my mind it is such an amazing thing that that our lives were joined in that moment on April 13th, 1945; all the years [that] have gone by since. We have had lives, families, jobs, whatever. And here we are again, and now we meet face to face and recall together that moment when my tank reached the train.“
[RED, TO SURVIVOR] “You are always expressing gratitude to me, the 743rd Tank Battalion and the 30th Infantry Division. But I do not believe gratitude is deserved because we were doing what we, and the whole world, should have been doing- rescuing and protecting innocent people from being killed, murdered by vicious criminals. You do not owe us. We owe you! We can never repay you and the Jewish people of Europe for 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.That is how I feel.“
[SURVIVOR]: “You know, I kept calling him my liberator. He says: ‘I am really not your liberator. It was my job. I just happened to be there.’ I said, ‘I do not care what you tell me. I mean, you are my liberator!”[chuckles]
Long time, no see, Red. The world needs heroes, my friend. Deal with it.
Johanna at Margraten American Cemetery, Netherlands, Memorial Day, 2023.
POSTSCRIPT: I’m dedicating this post to my young German friend Johanna, who was born near the liberation site almost exactly the time of my first encounter with Red Walsh. Thank you for keeping the memory alive. We are on a journey, and just remember, it ebbs and flows, and that is the way of the universe.
Tuesday morning, June 6, 1944. Omaha Beach. National Archives.
So, it is the sixth of June again.
The ocean pounds the advance of sand amidst the relics of a different age, the hulking remnants of the tide of battle. The surf rolls in and kisses the beach, as the last participants mix on the hallowed bluff above with the politicians who have gathered from all over the world.
Thirty-nine years ago I watched as the American president honored the fallen, and the living, at the cemetery for the fortieth anniversary. Just out of college, something stirred inside me. Something was awoken.
Those thirty-nine years have passed. I began by writing letters to the newspaper. I began to interview D-Day veterans and others. I began to collect stories- not relics, prizes, or artifacts. I really had little interest in captured Nazi flags or samurai swords.
I wanted to talk to the men who were there.
The fiftieth anniversary came next with great pomp and more reflection. It graced the covers of the major newsweeklies. “Saving Private Ryan” would soon stir the consciousness of a new generation, and the reflections of the old. And I learned so much more of the war beyond the beachhead. That there were so many beachheads.
The sixtieth anniversary came around. Students on their bi-annual trips to France would bring me back their photographs and the requisite grains of white sand from Omaha Beach. Teenagers had their emotions a bit tempered, I think. I would go on to introduce them to so many who were there, when they themselves were teenagers.
So now it is the seventy-ninth. On the 65th, I wrote about a friend, Buster Simmonds, a combat medic who is no longer with us. Another time, I featured a D-Day veteran, Bill Gast, a 743rd tanker who made it from surf to beach and beyond.
And it is the subject of the fifth oral history in my World War II series, ‘The Things Our Fathers Saw: D-Day and Beyond’. Featured in it is one of our frequent classroom visitors, Tony Leone, a Coast Guard veteran of D-Day aboard an LST. And as I was working on his narrative this past March, footage of his ACTUAL SHIP, LST 27, was discovered, loading up for D-Day [click the photo below, it is only a minute long].
Tony left us in 2010. I’ll leave you with the book excerpt below. And remember to pause for a moment this day, June 6th, to think about what they did, 79 years ago.
Excerpt from ‘The Things Our Fathers Saw: D-Day and Beyond, by Matthew A. Rozell
He sits behind a student desk, wearing a medal presented to him by the French government that he also wears to Mass every Sunday. ‘I wear it with pride to pay homage to those fellows who burned alive next to me. I made it and they didn’t. It still bothers me.’
He rests on his walking cane and leans forward as he speaks. He is animated—he motions with his hands to emphasize his points. A prolific author and newspaper letter writer, Anthony’s mission is to educate the public about what his generation of Americans went through: ‘It would be at least 25 years after World War II before I could begin to think about the experiences of that time. They were buried deep in my subconscious and remained there so that my mind and body could heal.’
Anthony F.J. Leone
The Invasion of Normandy
I got assigned to USS LST 27. I said to myself, ‘What the heck is an LST?’ We boarded in Norfolk, Virginia. I carried my sea bag, along with the rest of the graduates of boot camp, up this long gangway. This was the biggest vessel I had ever seen in my life! If you had it up here on Lake George, it was 327 feet long, imagine that, and 50 feet wide. That’s a big ship.
‘LST’ stands for ‘Landing Ship, Tanks’. What we did is to carry small boats. We sent the small boats in first loaded with troops and vital supplies, then we came in right up to the beachhead with the LSTs and opened the bow doors and dropped the ramps. But on D-Day, not even the small boats could get in among the obstacles, and there were mines all over the place. They were killing our soldiers like sheep to the slaughter.
*
We left Norfolk in March of 1944 and landed in Africa. We had gone through bad air raids by the Germans in the Mediterranean and U-boat attacks but we survived. One ship was hit and set afire, a ship carrying lumber, and incidentally the crews couldn’t get the fire out; it was in the stern of our convoy. We got attacked by the Luftwaffe, JU-88s and Dornier torpedo bombers.
We reached Africa without further incident and then we sailed for England. We landed in Swansea, Wales, and we got liberty [after] we unloaded an LCT from the ship. An LCT is a long, wide, flat-box sort of landing craft where the ramp drops down and the conning tower is in the back, and we had one topside. We carried it piggyback; what we did was fill the starboard bilge tanks with water and then chop the cables holding the LCT on, onto these greased wooden skids. By severing the cables, the thing would slam into the water with a big splash. We got rid of that thing because there were some heavy seas and we were top heavy. These were the craft that what would land the men, later on.
About the end of May, about a week before D-Day, we went to Southampton, and then to Falmouth, to become part of the back-up force for the D-Day landings. We took on units from the 175th Infantry, which belonged to the 29th Division. Everything was frozen in place, we couldn’t move. The area was sealed off, we couldn’t go on liberty, we couldn’t visit the British girls, which was quite a sacrifice in those days, since they were all over the Yanks. We were like the invention of sliced bread; the British girls couldn’t get enough of the Yanks. [Laughs] We had a lot of money I guess, and we showed up the British service men pretty bad. The American troops over there, their behavior was abominable. The British treated them really good, but the Americans were spoiled had a lot of money, and… well, it’s the same old story.
They sealed us off, and on the 4th and 5th of June we were ready to go. We headed toward ‘Piccadilly Circus’, that was the code name of the circle in the middle of the Channel that we were supposed rendezvous at, from there the flotillas would go towards the English beachheads [in Normandy] and we would go towards the American beachheads, Omaha Beach and Utah Beach.
We went out to the sea on the 5th, and it was really stormy. Eisenhower was really blown away by [the weather]. So, they waited, and I guess a British meteorologist saw a break, a window in the weather. Eisenhower had decided to go for it, he had his fingers crossed, he had a letter ready apologizing for the loss of lives and withdraw from the continent in case it failed.[1] So, we went, the first units moved up from British ports of Southampton, London, Plymouth and Portland. We were the second, the backup force from Falmouth.
The Americans had gotten off the beach by late June 6th. Of course, [before that], the Germans had mowed them down like a wheat field. As I said before, there were German privates just sitting there with machine guns, just killing Americans and crying as they were doing it, ‘Please go back, I don’t want to kill no more!’ [Repeats this line in German]. At one point, General Bradley was going to pull them off, take all the people at Omaha Beach and bring them over to Utah. Utah was a pretty successful landing—there, casualties were [far less].
By the time we got to the [Omaha] beachhead the next day, it was a mess. We came in with the LSTs. We had already launched our LCVPs [on June 6] which brought in the troops, the ‘Landing Craft Vehicle-Personnel’, that is, a Higgins Boat. It was invented by Andrew Higgins, a boat builder from the United States. Then it was time for us to come in and unload the tanks.
It was now June 7th; all you saw was a layer of white smoke on the beach. The [US Army] Rangers had gotten in behind the Germans, but when we [first arrived there with the big ship], it was still hot, there were still mines all over the place, hedgehogs and stakes driven in the ground with Teller mines sitting on them. At high tide when you came in you couldn’t see them. Our LCVPs had to negotiate between them, this was impossible at high tide, you had to wait until the tide was way out, then the soldiers had to walk almost half a mile over bare land, no foliage or anything.
As we came in, it was pretty hard to negotiate because the mined obstacles were still all over the place and there were pieces of human bodies floating all over. The American soldiers had the life belts on that you activate, and they inflated because they had a CO2 cartridge. But because the guys had heavy packs on, it would up-end them and drown them because they couldn’t get loose. We saw a lot of soldiers floating that way. Their life belts worked alright, but they killed them. Their bodies floated to and fro all day long.
After we saw that, we were not too enthusiastic about going in and hitting the beach—we said, ‘If this is happening out here, what is going to happen there?’ Even though it was a couple days later, we were all armed to the teeth. We had our clothing well-impregnated with chemicals to withstand a gas attack, and when your body got out of it, that stuff would drive you crazy.
We proceeded in. Now up in our conning tower, our officers had barricaded themselves behind a pile of mattresses up in the bridge, not that they were ‘chicken’, they were just being smart about the whole thing, they didn’t want to get hit with shrapnel.
We had that on and we were all ready to go over, life jackets and helmets, I was manning the 20mm gun and all of a sudden, the public address system crackled. I heard the damnedest noise, that scared me more than the enemy, really, when it first came on [singing], ‘Mairzy doats and dozy doats And liddle lamzy divey/ A kiddley divey too/ Wouldn’t you?’. It was the voice of our skipper, and he was dead drunk. [Laughs] Now understand that he was a very solemn-looking individual, dark, so dark that at night we couldn’t see him, so we called him ‘The Shadow’—when he walked on the bridge, all you would see was the glow of his cigarette. He would let it burn to his lips and then spit it out, he was [tough as nails]. So here is this guy who is fearless, and as we were going in, he is singing ‘Mairzy Doats’[2] I would have chosen a different tune really, but everyone burst out laughing, so it was a morale builder in a sense. It told us the captain was human after all, and he was just as much afraid as we were!
So we went in and hit the beach, started up the ventilator fans as we had big tubes coming out of the tank deck to suck the exhaust fumes out—and incidentally, both their vehicles were burning oil, don’t know why, poor maintenance. They got them going and the trucks were towing—this was the 175th Heavy Tank Company, it was part of the 29th Division—they started to move out when the brake seized on the 57mm anti-tank cannon carriage they were towing in the back of the lead truck. Marion Burroughs, a friend of mine who was driving it later told me, ‘God that saved my life, that brake locking up like that, it never happened before in all my years of working with it.’ That’s the way things happen, you know. He motioned for the other truck to go back around him—it was an army wrecker, used for picking up tanks or wrecked vehicles. It went around and both of the vehicles went out, the wrecker hit a mine just coming off the ramp. They had it taped off where it was safe you know, I still think they went ‘off the tape’, the taped-off lanes to distinguish between the mined and unmined areas… It blew up and there were bodies all over the place and the trucks were filled with Chesterfield and Old Gold cigarettes, I remember vividly; ‘Lucky Strike had gone to war’ with gold packaging—they had taken the green out of the cigarette wrapper to save the cadmium that was green, I think—well, I remember those cigarettes just went all over the place, bazooka shells, the thing was loaded with ammo and gasoline and it went up, a flaming cauldron—it was like a blast furnace! These poor guys were screaming and they were pinned to the frame and you could see the rubber of the tires all turning to liquid and dripping. And their screams! It seemed like they screamed long after life left their bodies. I still hear them sometimes. If you ever hear a person screaming in agony when they were being burned alive… [looks down, shakes head]
We went out to see what we could do. I reached down and a piece of shrapnel came through the top of my helmet, punched it open, and broke some skin. I didn’t realize it until later, when the thing fell off my head and landed on the deck. You couldn’t get near the fire because the flames were so hot. A couple of individuals did rescue somebody, and I went out again to get another helmet. They were all over the place, like coconuts. I saw one with netting on it, and I went to get it and ‘zing-zing-zing’ [gestures quickly, tapping the air in succession three times], there were little bursts of sand right in front of it, some German probably anticipated my move and said, ‘well, this guy’s not going to get his helmet.’
One of our officers, a deck officer, a little fellow named Serge, went out and dragged somebody back to the ship. Now they had always made fun of Serge because of his size; he was puny, like another Don Knotts, all nervous and such. They all used to pick on him, like making him stand on a table because he was Jewish, things like that; that was World War II, you know. A colored steward would have to stand on the back of the bus—even though he survived a lot of battles, he had to stand on the back of the bus in Norfolk, Virginia. This is what World War II was really like.
He went out in the surf, the crazy [son of a gun, and rescued some guys], and he got back, I think he got the Silver Star or something for it. He was ten-foot-tall in our eyes after that. Finally, we closed the damn bow door; we lifted the ramp—it takes ages for that thing to come up on chains—and we closed the bow. We waited for the fires to subside and the flames went down, and we went out. We hated to see what was still out there. Things were still hot, fires were still burning, everything was gone—it was just bones sitting there, grinning skeletons.
[Later] on Utah Beach on June 19, a big storm stirred up a lot of mines. As we were coming in our lookout yelled, ‘Stop engines! Wreckage in the water, dead ahead!’ We slowed and stopped. Apparently, there was an LCT that had been hit earlier and it was laying there. Had we gone another 25 or 30 feet, we would have been impaled, practically stuck on the thing—so we couldn’t move. We reversed and motioned for the LST in line behind us to go around us. When they went around us, and as they made that move alongside, they blew right in half; they struck a mine. Now try to picture a huge structure like an LST, 327 feet long, welded steel, 50 feet wide, blowing in two, [lifting out of the water and straight up into the air]. The crew aboard it had a motley assortment of pets. They had pigeons, and chickens—what the hell would you have a chicken onboard for?—chickens, and dogs and cats; this was strictly forbidden, but they let them get away with it. Just before, we had been waving to the guys and laughing at the animals. We were the ‘Suicide Navy’, they called us. A very apropos title.
There were medical teams assigned to all the landing ships, like the LSTs, and they were composed of one or two naval doctors and a team of corpsmen. We had a surgical operating station in the back of the tank section, it was a complete operating room and they operated on the wounded there. At times we’d go back to eat, and we’d set our trays down in the dining room. They’d operate on the tables there, and our trays would slide in the blood—well, you don’t feel much like eating after that.
That is what I had to live with every day. The wounded, the dying, the death, it became a way of life. That’s bad, that’s real bad. When I got discharged from the service, I got a 100 percent disability because I was a basket case. I had to get some shock treatment, once or twice. I spent ten years at the VA hospital in out-patient treatment, I’m still going there in Albany. But I would do it all over again, because it was a cause. A cause célèbre, you might say. It’s nothing like what’s going on today.
War itself should be abolished, it should be outlawed. There can’t conceivably be any winners, [with these nuclear weapons]. For me it was bad enough to see men die all the time. I’d hate to see, right now today, a dog die—if a dog got hit by a car, I’d die, I’d feel badly. But now think about seeing human beings die, and then you get used to it, to endure you have to say to yourself, ‘This is a way of life, I have to live with it’. That crew became my family for two years, the only home I had. The medal presented to [us veterans by France] is the most beautiful medal I’ve ever seen, and I wear it with honor every Sunday. The priest doesn’t like the medal because to him it speaks of violence and war, but this is the biggest argument against war there is. For kids to even think of settling arguments with violence and war, that just shouldn’t be considered, because it is a foolish move. The innocent die.
[1]he had a letter ready-Eisenhower had hastily drafted a letter accepting responsibility in the event of a colossal failure at the Normandy landings: “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” National Archives.
[2]Mairzy Doats-A silly novelty song that hit #1 in the US pop charts in March 1944. As others have noted, the amusing sheet music lyrics sung by Mr. Leone are revealed in the song’s bridge, “If the words sound queer and funny to your ear/ A little bit jumbled and jivey/ Sing ‘Mares eat oats and does eat oats/ And little lambs eat ivy/ A kid’ll eat ivy too/ Wouldn’t you?”.
From the Portsmouth D-Day Story Museum: “The number of people killed in the fighting is not known exactly. Accurate record keeping was very difficult under the circumstances. Books often give a figure of 2,500 Allied dead for D-Day. However, research by the US National D-Day Memorial Foundation has uncovered a more accurate figure of 4,414 Allied personnel killed on D-Day. These include 2,501 from the USA, 1,449 British dead, 391 Canadians and 73 from other Allied countries. Total German losses on D-Day (not just deaths, but also wounded and prisoners of war) are estimated as being between 4,000 and 9,000. Over 100,000 Allied and German troops were killed during the whole of the Battle of Normandy, as well as around 20,000 French civilians, many as a result of Allied bombing.”
Here in the United States, Memorial Day is upon us.
In interviewing WW II veterans over the years, I found that most whom I was privileged to know shied away from honors and recognition on Memorial Day. I was reminded of the sacrifices that the veterans made, again and again, but they all told me that the real heroes were the ones that did not come home. And that Memorial Day was the day reserved for THEM; contrary to popular American opinion, it’s not another Veterans Day. But this weekend we tip our hat to the veterans among us, and post that ‘salute to the troops’, thank them for their service, and we are free to start our summer vacation. Did we just give ourselves some kind of pass?
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 remembrance, we effectively got our three-day weekend and our de facto beginning of summer. But do we really want to know? If we do, maybe we can take the time to seek out one of those who fell on those faraway fields, and think about what it means on a personal level, try to find out more about a life that was cut short. Here are a few to think about.
***
Riverside Cemetery, Oshkosh, Winnebago County, Wisconsin, USA. Credit: J M Schumann
This is Marvin Boller. His remains did make it home. A Thanksgiving letter written to him did not. The backstory:
In writing my second book, I revisited a horrific incident that occurred in the earliest days of American penetration onto enemy soil in Germany. Resistance was stiff; on a cold and rainy morning the day before Thanksgiving, 1944, three tanks of the 743rd Tank Battalion’s ‘D’ Company were wiped out in a muddy apple orchard a few miles across the river.
In 2012, I was alerted to the existence of this WWII era letter in a memorial museum in Belgium. The envelope was postmarked Nov. 27, 1944, and addressed from the USA to PFC Marvin K. Boller, D Co., 743rd Tank Battalion. It was from his wife, possibly. It was also stamped ‘DECEASED’. Return to Sender.
Vince Heggen, who tends graves of the men who were killed with Martin, posted this for Memorial Day:
Co D 743rd Tank Bn was moving from Langendorf to Erberich in November, 1944. It kept raining the whole day before they arrived in the orchards near Erberich. It was 8h20 when a German tank opened fire and knocked out 3 light tanks… All the crews were killed and a few of them are buried at the cemetery of Margraten. The letter, in front of the graves , was written by Marvin Boller’s wife. Marvin was killed just the day before Thanksgiving and the letter was marked ‘return to sender’. The letter made the link between the crew members of Marvin’s tank buried here, and Marvin who was buried [elsewhere].
I wrote to Carrol Walsh, a liberator of the train near Magdeburg and a fellow member of Company D, and asked if he knew Boller; I also sent him this image of the envelope.
He wrote back:
‘Hi Matt, I was stunned when I read your message. I remember Boller very well and remember when he got killed. I believe it was just before Thanksgiving 1944 when a big German tank wiped out three tanks of the first platoon of Co. D of the 743rd. Every member of every crew of every one of the tanks was killed. I seem to remember packages arriving for some of these guys after they had been killed. I used to tease Boller, who was an older man, because he wanted to vote for Tom Dewey and I was big for my pal, FDR. Boy what a memory you stirred up. I knew all the guys that got killed in that engagement.’
Walsh and others would survive and go on to liberate Holocaust survivors on April 13th, 1945. And the letter has never been opened.
I did not know you, I don’t know if anyone is alive who knew you, but you are not forgotten.
Teaching History Matters 