"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.
In 2003, I set out to interview a retiree living on the quiet boulevard leading up to our high school. I sat on his backporch with him for a few hours on a late spring afternoon. Born in 1922, he was in the Navy, serving as a radioman on a destroyer escort, and he seemed to be everywhere in the Pacific during World War II. Like John A. Leary, he also spent a great deal of time supporting the Marines, and saw his first action in the South Pacific in the reduction of the massive Japanese base at Rabaul on New Britain.
Mr. Peachman turned 93 this past March. He was my high school history teacher.
Alvin Peachman
From “The Things Our Fathers Saw” by Matthew Rozell.
Book Description: At the height of World War II, LOOK Magazine profiled an upstate New York community for a series of articles portraying it as the wholesome, patriotic model of life on the home front. Seventy years later, a high school history teacher and his students track down over two dozen veterans residing around ‘Hometown, USA’ who fought the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to the surrender at Tokyo Bay. They resurrect firsthand accounts of combat and brotherhood, of captivity and redemption, and the aftermath of a war that left no community unscathed. Here are the stories that the magazine could not tell, from a special generation of Americans speaking to the youth of America today. 270 pages.
About the Author: Matthew Rozell’s teaching career is now spanning 4 decades, beginning as a quiet kid returning to teach in his own hometown to being recognized as a national History Teacher of the Year and as a recipient of a national Medal for History Education. Rozell is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellow, has had his lessons filmed for NBC Learn, and has even been chosen as the ABC World News Person of the Week. He is also a recipient of several state and local awards for history education. He writes on the power of teaching and the importance of the study of history at his website,teachinghistorymatters.com.
This story below is an excerpt from my first book. It was published for the 70th anniversary of the end of the war.
My friend Jimmy Butterfield used to come to my classroom with his bride of 60+ years, Mary. She would joke with him, and us, and call him by his high school nickname, “But”. Maybe it was “Butt”, I don’t know, but they had fun playing around with each other in front of 17 and 18 year olds.
Jimmy, of course, was blind and hard of hearing. Mary had to yell at him, he would crack a grin under the dark glasses and flirt with her. The girls loved it. When the hearing aide was cranked up to eleven, we would get some echo and feedback, which didn’t seem to bother him, or the students in the class listening to his story. He just liked to talk to the kids.
Several years ago, after the two of them and Danny Lawler (another First Marine Division veteran of really hard fighting in the Pacific at Peleliu and Okinawa) came to my room for an afternoon, I came home to an email from one of my senior girls, telling me how meaningful meeting Jimmy and Mary and Danny was to her and her classmates. I still have it.
You see, Jim Butterfield got struck not once but twice in the head by enemy fire at Okinawa about this time in May 1945 (that is 70 years ago this month, if you are noticing). He was evacuated first to Guam, then to Hawaii and later stateside for over 18 months, and as many operations, for reconstructive surgery. When he did realize that he would never see again, he was ready to tell his high school sweetheart to leave him be. Not to get attached to him, a blind man.
Well, she told us what she thought of that. They ran a small mom and pop store back in Glens Falls together until they retired.
Why is Jim’s story important? Well, you’ll have to listen to him tell it. You have the sense of the unfolding realization of the loss he is feeling, but at the same time, wonderment at his and Mary’s resilience in making a successful life afterwards. The sacrifices made by this and other generations of veterans becomes real. We need to also note that Jim came home. Chappy and many others others did not.
Jim never looked for sympathy or pity- and of course would be the first to point out that Memorial Day is for those who did not return. But still, if we are to pause as a nation for one weekend to remember, we can’t forget what this nineteen year old from Hometown USA gave up as well.
Mary and Jim have since passed on. What obstacles they overcame together…
Rest on Jimmy and Mary. Thanks for letting us witness your story.
******************************************
From “The Things Our Fathers Saw” by Matthew Rozell.
Mary and Jim Butterfield in my classroom, Jan. 2007.
Excerpted from “The Things Our Fathers Saw: The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation from Hometown, USA“. Order the book here.
Book Description: At the height of World War II, LOOK Magazine profiled an upstate New York community for a series of articles portraying it as the wholesome, patriotic model of life on the home front. Seventy years later, a high school history teacher and his students track down over two dozen veterans residing around ‘Hometown, USA’ who fought the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to the surrender at Tokyo Bay. They resurrect firsthand accounts of combat and brotherhood, of captivity and redemption, and the aftermath of a war that left no community unscathed. Here are the stories that the magazine could not tell, from a special generation of Americans speaking to the youth of America today. 292 pages.
A project by a student in my colleague Sara Kollbaum’s 12th grade class in Nashville, Ill. It was inspired by a story I posted last month.
‘This song was inspired by an individual of the Holocaust, liberator Robert Hays. Please read his story and spread his story so that we can remember him and all other individuals [affected by] that horrible event. Enjoy and remember those who fell victim to the Holocaust. To listen to a witness is to become a witness.’
Agreed. As a liberator once told me, ‘I am a “survivor” of World War II, too.’
Photographs
Composed and performed by Easten Hoepker
Verse 1
We grow up and get old
We grow wise and get bold
And we learn while we go
And we think we know
We go fast and go far
We stay near and work hard
We remember our scars
Make us who we are
Pre-chorus
But as time goes on we get caught in the moment
Don’t look back, we’re not going that way
But every once in a while we need a reminder
Not to forget our past
Chorus
A picture can speak a thousand words, they say
But a thousand words can’t explain how it felt that day
This is not so much a post about writing as one about a writer’s education, about one of those experiences that molds us, shapes us into storytellers.
My father, Robert Hays, was the son of an alcoholic tenant farmer in rural west Tennessee. If the appellation “dirt poor” fit anyone, it fit my grandfather’s family. Daddy served in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 30s. He and my mother, who was in the woman’s equivalent of the CCC, working as a nurse’s aide at Western State Mental Hospital in Bolivar, Tennessee, met on a blind date in early 1940 and married in September of that year.
But just over a year later, Pearl Harbor happened. America was in the war. My father was among the first of those drafted in 1942. I won’t bore you with the details, but he participated in the North African, Salerno, Anzio, and southern France invasions, saved by the luck of the draw from Normandy. But they slogged through France and on to Germany. On April 29, 1945, Allied troops liberated the Dachau concentration camp. I don’t know whether he entered Dachau that day or the next, but that he was there within hours of the liberation is beyond dispute. A few months later, after more than three years overseas, he came home.
In later years, he would talk occasionally about the war, providing anecdotes that showed the chaos and random chance of battle. He spoke of driving through Kasserine Pass in North Africa just hours before the Germans killed thousands of Allied troops in a stunning attack. He spoke of a friend, defending his position from a foxhole, who was thought dead after an artillery shell landed right next to him. When the dust cleared, the friend was buried up to his neck in dirt, but did not have a scratch on him. He spoke often of Anzio, where he was wounded, and of the massive German air assaults on those soldiers clinging to that tiny sliver of beach along the Italian coast.
But he never spoke of Dachau.
The bodies of former prisoners are piled in the crematorium mortuary in the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp. Dachau, Germany, April 29, 1945. USHMM.
Ever.
When he died in 1981, we found a photo in his wallet. An old sepia-toned shot like others he had taken during the war, pictures that he kept in an old brown bag. But this one was different.
It showed a pile of naked bodies. Well, really more skeletons than not, with their skin stretched pitifully over their bones. On the back, as had been his habit, was typed simply “Dachau.”
I was confused. Why would he keep this one photo in his wallet all of those years? Especially a photo of a place and event that he never spoke about. It obviously had some deeper meaning for him than the other photographs. If it had been a shot of the building he was in when he was wounded (hit by an artillery shell), I could have seen that. A reminder of his closest brush with death. Yeah, I could buy that. But this macabre photo? That, I couldn’t see.
So, for the next fifteen years, I remained puzzled.
Until the fall of 1996. I was working in Poland, and I had some time off. I took an overnight bus from Katowice, Poland to Munich. It was an interesting trip all in itself. We sat in a line of buses at midnight on the Polish/German border, waiting for our turn to cross, next to a cemetery, as if in some Cold War spy movie. I remember passing Nuremburg and thinking that my father had been there at the end of the war. And then there was Munich.
I spent a day or two wandering through the streets, drinking beer in the Marienplatz. I’m a historical novelist, so the short trip out to Dachau was a no-brainer. Of course it was as much my father’s connection with it as anything else that spurred the visit. But I’m not sure that I was completely aware of that at the time.
Dachau literally sits just on the outskirts of the Munich metropolitan area. I looked at the sign on the train station with a sadness, wondering for how many people that had been one of the last things they saw. It was only later that I discovered there had been another depot for those passengers.
The Dachau Memorial is a place of deep emotion. In the camp proper, mostly all that are left are the foundations of the barracks. One has been reconstructed to give an idea of how horrible life must have been. The camp was originally intended to hold 6,000 inmates; when the Allies liberated Dachau in 1945, they found 30,000. The museum and exhibits are primarily in the old maintenance building. I looked with awe at life size photos of prisoners machine gunned, their hands torn to ribbons from the barbed wire they had tried to climb in a futile attempt at escape.
I followed the visitors (I can’t call them tourists) north to where you crossed over into the crematorium area. It was there that the full brunt of what had taken place at Dachau really hit me. A simple brick complex, it seemed so peaceful on the fall day that I stood before it. But as I read the plaques and consulted my guidebook, as I stepped through the door and actually saw the “shower” rooms where the prisoners were gassed, as I stared into the open doors of the ovens, I felt a rage unlike any I had ever known consume me.
Covering my eyes, embarrassed at the tears, I slipped back outside. It took more than a few minutes to regain my composure. I thought then that I understood why my father kept that photo close to him for so long. It was a reminder of what one group of people had done to another group of fellow humans. The obscenity of it had overwhelmed him as it had me.
That night, I went to the famous Hofbrauhaus in Munich, to wash the images of the ovens away with some beer. I hadn’t been there long when an elderly American couple sat at the table. They were from Florida, a pleasant couple. He had been a young lieutenant in the American army on the push into Munich. In fact, it had been his pleasure to liberate the Hofbrauhaus from the Germans.
Of course, I asked the question. “Were you at Dachau?”
He didn’t answer for several seconds, tears glistening in the corners of his eyes as his wife’s hand covered his and squeezed. Finally, he nodded, reached into a back pocket and pulled out his wallet.
With a flick of his wrist, a photo, just as wrinkled, just as bent, as the one my father had carried landed on the table. It wasn’t the same scene, but one just like it.
Here was my chance, the opportunity to ask the question I had never been able to ask my father. I pulled the photo from my own wallet and lay it next to his. “Why? Why have you carried it so long? To remind you of the horror of Dachau, of what had been done here?”
His face carried the faintest of smiles as he shook his head. “No, son, to remind us of the horrors that we are capable of, to remind us not to go down that road again.”
The difference was subtle, but in that moment, I learned two lessons invaluable to a writer, subtle differences are important, and when you want to know the truth, go to the source.
As I sit here now and look at that same photograph, I realize that it was my father’s legacy to me, of Dachau.
Now, nearly 70 years after that day in 1945, Dachau is still with us, and I hope the legacy left by our fathers always will be.
There are ‘wrong’ ways to teach about the Holocaust.
Here are the general guidelines in a project I created for the Museum Teacher program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with fellow Museum Teacher Fellow Sara Kollbaum, set to original music sung and performed by student Kylie James. For students, her song is also a good model of what an expressive and appropriate learning project can be about.
From the original You Tube link: ‘Educational project completed for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to help educators teach the Holocaust. It features the work of Kylie James, student, her song set to photographs collected by USHMM Fellow Matthew Rozell and USHMM Fellow Sara Kollbaum.It is four and a half minutes long. The song begins 30 seconds in.’
This is for Remembrance
Verse 1: Six million died
Innocents who lost their lives
Children and their mothers all lined up by their numbers
‘One of the primary concerns of educators teaching the history of the Holocaust is how to present horrific, historical images in a sensitive and appropriate manner. Graphic material should be used judiciously and only to the extent necessary to achieve the lesson objective. Try to select images and texts that do not exploit the students’ emotional vulnerability or that might be construed as disrespectful to the victims themselves. Do not skip any of the suggested topics because the visual images are too graphic; instead, use other approaches to address the material.
In studying complex human behavior, many teachers rely upon simulation exercises meant to help students “experience” unfamiliar situations. Even when great care is taken to prepare a class for such an activity, simulating experiences from the Holocaust remains pedagogically unsound. The activity may engage students, but they often forget the purpose of the lesson and, even worse, they are left with the impression that they now know what it was like to suffer or even to participate during the Holocaust. It is best to draw upon numerous primary sources, provide survivor testimony, and refrain from simulation games that lead to a trivialization of the subject matter.
Furthermore, word scrambles, crossword puzzles, counting objects, model building, and other gimmicky exercises tend not to encourage critical analysis but lead instead to low-level types of thinking and, in the case of Holocaust curricula, trivialization of the history. If the effects of a particular activity, even when popular with you and your students, run counter to the rationale for studying the history, then that activity should not be used.’
V-E Day 70th Anniversary Commemoration
Friday, May 8, 2015 ~ 10:30 a.m.
World War II Memorial
Washington, DC.
This event is free and open to the public. However, the limited seating available has been filled. If you are a World War II Veteran or you have a WWII Veteran in your group, please contact hrotondi@wwiimemorialfriends.org.
It is hard to believe that it has been nearly 70 years since millions of people around the globe poured into the streets to celebrate the end of World War II in Europe.
To commemorate this significant date in world history, the Friends of the National World War II Memorial and the National Park Service will co-host a very special V-E Day 70th Anniversary Commemoration on May 8th at 10:30 a.m. at the WWII Memorial.
Former Secretary of State Dr. Madeleine Albright will provide remarks. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Dr. Albright and her family spent the war years in exile in England. Raised Catholic, Dr. Albright did not learn until adulthood that her parents were originally Jewish and that many of her relatives in Czechoslovakia had perished in the Holocaust, including three of her grandparents.
Also taking part in the ceremony will be dozens of World War II veterans and representatives of the United States and the embassies of nearly 30 European Theater Allied Nations who will lay wreaths at the “Freedom Wall” of the Memorial in memory of the more than 400,000 Americans and 60 million people killed worldwide during the deadliest military conflict in human history.
Alex Kershaw, renowned historian and author of “The Bedford Boys: The Story of Bedford, Virginia’s Extraordinary D-Day Sacrifice” and “The Liberator: One Soldier’s 500-Day Odyssey from the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau,” will serve as the event’s Master of Ceremonies and Expert Historian.
The ceremony will be followed by the “Arsenal of Democracy World War II Victory Capitol Flyover,” which will include dozens of World War II aircraft flying in 15 historically sequenced warbird formations overhead. The formations will represent the war’s major battles, from Pearl Harbor through the final air assault on Japan, and conclude with a missing man formation to “Taps.” The Flyover is set to start at 12:10 p.m. and last approximately 40 minutes.
Teaching History Matters 