Teaching History Matters

COUNTDOWN TO LIBERATION-75 YEARS

“WATER, WATER!”
by Train Near Magdeburg survivor Ervin Abadi. Completed at Hillersleben DP camp, May, 1945. Soldier Monroe Williams collection. USHMM.

“T-minus” 65 DAYS Countdown to Commemoration at Farsleben, Germany-Millions of people were on the move.

On April 13, 2020, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the first train transport out of Bergen-Belsen, I will board an airplane for Germany. I will return to the site of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, and make my way to the train liberation site at Farsleben near the city of Magdeburg on the Elbe River, to join survivors, their families and the second generation of soldiers in commemoration with local students and others.

In our countdown to commemoration at the site of liberation in Germany, I will share updates and circle back to some early writings or book content. Millions of people were on the move; survivor Leslie Meisels remembers “the first miracle of my survival.”

• Late January 1945: 29,000 Jews, mostly women, are evacuated on forced marches from Danzig, Poland, and Stutthof, Poland. Only 3000 survive.
• Late January 1945: Thousands of Jews are sent on a death march from the Lamsdorf camp near Breslau, Germany, westward toward Thuringia, Germany. Hundreds die or are killed on the way.
• February 1945: Ukrainian nationalists hunt down and murder Jews throughout the Ukraine.February 1945: Allied forces close on Cologne, Germany.
• February 3, 1945: 3500 prisoners from Gross-Rosen, Germany, are marched southwest to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, Germany, nearly 200 miles away. Five hundred will die on the way. Two thousand more are evacuated by train to the labor camp at Ebensee, Austria, near Mauthausen; 49 will die on the journey and another 182 will perish at the camp.
• February 8, 1945: Soviet troops are 30 miles east of Dresden, Germany.
  February 13, 1945: German troops surrender Budapest, Hungary.
  February 13, 1945: The SS evacuates the concentration camp at Gross-Rosen, Germany.

Source(s): Weber, Louis. The Holocaust Chronicle. Publications International Ltd., 2007. http://www.holocaustchronicle.org

Seventeen-year-old Leslie Meisels, liberated at Farsleben that April of 1945, recalled disobeying his mother for the first time in his life after the Germans invaded Hungary in Spring, 1944::

On the third day, there was an announcement that families with five or more children had to report to the railway track, where a group was being assembled for transport. We knew that people were being taken away, but the government’s propaganda emphasized that any rumors we heard about Jews undergoing cruelty at the hands of the Nazis was just that, a rumor; they made us believe that for the remainder of the war, which we hoped would be short, we were being sent somewhere for slave labor. As bad as that seemed, we still thought that if they wanted our labor, they would have to give us food and shelter. At the tannery we had nothing, and so we believed that anywhere else would be better. We didn’t know at that time about the Nazis’ unparalleled, unimaginable annihilation plan, already working full blast in Auschwitz and the other death camps.

Later, there was another announcement calling for families with four children to report to the train. One of my best friends, who had four siblings and was going to be on that transport, came to me saying that they had heard that they needed eight more families with three children to make up the quota and asked if we wanted to come along with their group. I went back to my mother and told her this, even though nobody knew where the people on the transport were going or what would happen to the rest of us. My mother said we shouldn’t go because they hadn’t called for families with three children.

I have to explain that in those days, a seventeen-year-old never, ever, said ‘no’ to his or her parents. Up to that moment, I, too, had never spoken back to my mother, but this time I said, ‘We’re not staying! We’re going!’ We argued back and forth until I grabbed my belongings and started to walk. She had no choice but to follow. My father had already been taken away to the unknown, and she didn’t want her family to be broken up any further.

I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know now, what made me defy my mother, but it was the first miracle of my survival, [for this was a transport that was shunted away from Auschwitz towards Austria].

***

The doors closed, and the train took off to an unknown destination. In that closed-in, dark, crowded place we were given two 25-liter pails, one with drinking water and one for human waste. The water was soon gone, and the waste pail flowed over. These were changed, refilled, and emptied once a day when we stopped at a station. On the seventh day, we arrived at a town called Strasshof in Austria, about 25 kilometers northeast of Vienna, a central transit station for deportees arriving from Hungary and other places. When the door opened, we heard Germans harshly yelling, ‘Raus! Raus!’ ‘Out! Out!’ As we left our car, I saw several bodies being carried out from each of the wagons. Six or eight bodies were carried out of ours. Many had succumbed from lack of food, water, and ventilation.

We were all sent into a large room and together—children, adolescent boys and girls, mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers—had to disrobe and march naked to a shower between two lines of laughing, pointing, machine-gun-toting SS guards with dogs. Walking to that shower was the very first real dehumanization I experienced. It drove into our minds the fact that we were not who we used to be, not individuals who had our own dignity, respected within our communities, but, rather, people who the SS guards considered to be subhuman. I was stunned, as were my mother and grandmother. All those laws that had existed in Hungary for a number of years and prevented Jews from living a free and normal life, even the German occupation and being forced to wear the yellow star—none of it was as psychologically damaging as this was. It wasn’t just a physically and mentally unpleasant experience—this was the ultimate shock from which I don’t think I recovered.

***

As we waited, we saw some of the people who had come with us on the train being led back to the cattle wagons, and we all wondered where they were going. When we saw that our respected rabbi and his wife who were both in their late seventies, were being forced into one of these cattle wagons, my mother gave me a half-full pot of roasted flour and goose fat we had been saving and told me to take it to them because they might need it. I went right over to the wagon and finding the door slightly open, gave them the pot from my mother. After thanking me, the rabbi put his hands on top of my head and recited the priestly blessing, ‘May God keep you… bless you and be gracious to you….’ It was very moving, and I felt touched. He had barely finished the blessing when an SS guard came over and slammed the door shut, pushing me away. This has always stayed with me.^[1]

[1] This has always stayed with me-Thirty-five years later, Leslie had the opportunity to meet the granddaughter of this beloved rabbi, and share her grandfather’s blessing with her.

from the narrative of Leslie Meisels, used with his permission, edited for inclusion in A Train Near Magdeburg (The Young Adult Adaptation): The Holocaust, the Survivors, and the American Soldiers who Saved Them