Teaching History Matters

On April 15, we were in Germany and visited the site of one of former medic Walter Gantz’s recurring nightmares. Walter passed about six months after Mike Edwards, the director of the upcoming film A Train Near Magdeburg, took this photo at his final interview with us in his hometown of Scranton, PA. I wrote the post shortly after; our Easter Saturday visit to the cemetery: I hope somehow there was a measure of closure for him, in talking to this German student, and for us to find her resting spot.

“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 of 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, 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.”

Easter Saturday was grey, cold and overcast, occasionally spitting rain. We picked up Johanna, our now-established translator, and headed to Hillersleben, to meet Daniel Keweloh and his family, to conduct interviews with Germans who were alive when the train was liberated and remembered the soldiers, the Jewish victims, and the hospital at Hillersleben where Walter Gantz and other GIs cared for them. About 150 died here in the next month, and were buried here, including a 15-year-old girl who Walter had become attached to. When she died five weeks later, he carried her body out to the morgue tent.

This greatly affected him the rest of his life.

In 2018, when she was 16, Johanna wrote to me to ask if there were any soldiers still alive. I responded with Walter’s contact information, and she reached out to him. They carried on a warm relationship by mail over the next year, just before his death; I know on a special level that this helped heal the trauma that he could not speak about for most of his life.

Daniel K. and his father Klaus-Peter took us to the now practically abandoned cemetery, surrounded by a sea of solar panels where the hospital and garrison complex had been-first German, then Soviet occupation until the end of the Cold War. No individual graves were individually marked, as they were buried in an old air raid shelter outside of the hospital.

There, with Johanna present, we found Eva’s name on the wall…