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

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

‘They were our angels’

Reunion sparks memories of Nazi prisoners’ train trip to freedom

By Schuyler Kropf, The Charleston Post and Courier

Saturday, March 28, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He didn’t say a word, but he didn’t have to,” Barry recalled, as the reality of his new life of freedom set in.
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