DAY 4. Today, Thursday, we interviewed German students in their former school near the liberation site. They discuss the responsibility of keeping history alive, and the worldwide impact of this important story that unfolded in their literal backyard.
We arrived at the school and met Johanna, and were let in by a custodian, as the students and teachers are on their Easter spring break. I toured the school with her as the guys set up the set, set up in the former classroom of her former history teacher, Karin P. at the end of a long corridor.
Johanna was interviewed there, as were some of her former schoolmates.
Their history teacher had attended a lecture in the spring of 2018 by local Hillersleben father and son historians Daniel and Klaus-Peter Keweloh in Farsleben. If you recall, Farsleben is where the train had stopped, stranded, with the Holocaust prisoners awaiting their fate uneasily, some younger ones entering the village to look or beg for food, others going to the small lake or pond near the tracks on April 12th. After the liberation by the tanks of the 743rd Tank Battalion on the 13th, more troops of the 30th Infantry Division and the attached 95th Medical Gas Battalion arrived to evacuate the sick and emaciated people to the newly captured garrison town and hospitals at Hillersleben. The 823rd Tank Destroyer Battalion had by then also arrived to take over the town of Farsleben, where its commander had placed his service weapon to the head of the mayor of the town to quietly assure him that he expected his orders to provide for the survivors that Friday be carried out with immediate assistance of food and shelter; bakeries cooked all the night and local farmers were ordered to bring in food supplies as well.
So today we talked to theses schoolkids, and teacher, later, at her home. The English of the students ranged from quite acceptable to outstanding, they actually begin language studies quite young, with the emphasis in the fifth through 12th grade on English. Interesting, and naturally, their parents learned Russian, but you have to remember that six weeks after the Americans took this area, the terms of the Yalta Agreement kicked in, and the Soviet Red Army moved in, Soviet control lasting until the fall of the USSR in1991, and Russian occupation until 1994.
These kids spoke first without their teacher present. They all attested to her fire, her passion for history—like me, a thirty-year veteran of the classroom. Johanna especially recounted her interest in modern European and world history taking off with the introduction of things like the French Revolution, World War I and World War II in the tenth level or grade, the exact age group that I also taught it in the United States, to 15 and 16-year-olds. I felt like I was back in the classroom myself, with my own interested students. I told them that, and that their history teacher sounded a lot like me in her delivery of the material to be learned; you don’t just tell the kids to ‘open up to page 142 and read aloud’. You teach them real facts, for sure, but then you probe further into motivations, opposing perspectives and viewpoints; you ask them to delve into sections that others might dismiss or move right along over. You guide them to question their own processes, emotions, and to use newly practiced skills of reasoning, writing and detective work in their own lives. Sometimes, a teacher is presented with an opportunity to ‘do history’ in a very big way. And most of those times, this involves taking big risks, stepping out of traditional comfort zones, putting one’s self on the line, one’s ‘money where one’s mouth’ is, ‘walking the talk’. But have you ever had a fire within burning, expressed it in a special setting, and seen it jump to others? Because it will take on a life of its own, and you get to witness new ideas and concrete happenings that never existed being created before your eyes. It is the most exciting feeling, like falling in love for the first time. And it spontaneously grows almost out of your original control, but you also realize that had it not been for your passion, and later your patient nurturing, it might not have even ever existed. And that is a humbling thing to be lucky enough to realize.
So this is what I saw these students describing about their teacher. To myself, I thought that when Karin does see the competed film, with their testimony we recorded today, she will be one of the lucky ones, the teacher who can see what her passion wrought outside of the classroom, with out having it come out only 30 or 40 years later when people remember you fondly at your own funeral.
The other thing that struck me today was what the teacher felt when she learned of this story in 2018 from the historians, and saw was the photographs and soldier and survivor testimony [from this website and the Hudson Falls school one that preceded it], about what was really a lost event that linked their two small hamlets.
“How could I not know about this?”
So she put out all call for interested students to join her at a meeting after school, and a core group got involved the next fall school term. They learned of a local woman who remembered the incident, and who had one of the Greek Jews boarding at her home, where they did become close. Johanna learned that indeed, some of the local families did express compassion, kindness; others, of course, were fearful, wary of these thousand of persons now on the outside of the town. Who are they? Where did they come from?
They teamed up with the local museum to create an exhibit, and met survivors who traveled once again to the town of their liberation as children. Ron Chaulet set up a foundation in the Netherlands to collect donations for a proper, permanent memorial.
Teenagers got to meet the first Jewish persons they ever encountered. They entered this project in a history competition and won a prize. And they wanted to learn more about the Holocaust. They organized a trip to Bergen Belsen. The came face to face with the horrors inflicted upon their world by a government that existed for twelve years in their own country— one their own grandparents and great grandparents lived in.
The teacher was brave to introduce her students to this history, to go forth with this project. Some of the students got subtle pushback when reaction to their project was publicized; a fatigue of sorts by ordinary Germans being called to account for the crimes of their grandparents generation, at home and abroad.
That’s not what the project was about, though as Johanna noted in one of her recorded statements, it is about feeling responsibility for keeping the knowledge of the Holocaust, and what happened in her backyard, in the front of people’s minds. For Karin, it was about doing the right thing not only as a teacher, but as a human being. Since the publication of the liberator photographs on my website and now others, and my 2016 book, survivors have been coming here to see where their parents, and in some cases, they themselves as children, were liberated, or where parents or grandparents succumbed and were buried. How could there be nothing at the liberation site to recall, honor, and remember?
Teaching History Matters 