I finally got to visit the resting place of the man who, in a miracle of many miracles of the story of The Train Near Magdeburg, changed the trajectory of my life, over the two decades after he reluctantly entered it. He was not crazy about sitting down with a high school history teacher he did not even know, to tell his World War II story. It took coaxing from his son-in-law, his daughter, and also ultimately the fact that his grandson was enrolled via a computer printout sheet into my classroom.
Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh was laid to rest here in the foothills of the Adirondacks in Johnstown, NY in the early summer of 2013. It was he, a now retired NYS Supreme Court justice, who first told me the story of the train, at the prompting of his daughter Elizabeth at her home in Hudson Falls exactly a dozen years before, when I was 40. He was eighty, sitting in a rocking chair, telling stories with a relish. But he had almost forgotten about the incident when his tank and another came upon the train of 2500 Jewish victims of the Holocaust, a transport from Bergen-Belsen that had become a death train, but that was now the transport that led to life, with the chance encounter with these American forces near the Elbe River on Friday, the 13th of April, 1945.
“There we were, driving across central Germany, a beautiful April day, when we came across a train, a long string of boxcars…. and what are we going to do, with all these people? They need help…”
“You should talk to my friend George Gross. He was in the second tank, and he had a camera…”
So I did. Dr. Gross, former professor of English literature, was honored and eager to help a fellow educator. He gave me the narrative he wrote up, his tank having stayed with the train for 24 hours after Walsh’s tank rushed to join the column heading towards the pivotal final battle at the city of Magdeburg, which refused to surrender, a dozen miles away. He also had a camera, and recorded a dozen or so shots. He also gave me the dramatic moment of liberation photo taken by the major as the tanks and the major’s jeep pulled up to the train in the initial moment of investigation, which turned out to be the precise moment of salvation and liberation. I posted them on my school website, which displayed the stories of the World War II veterans I had interviewed 50 plus years after war’s end. And they sat there: the ‘hit counter’ I had installed averaged 25 pings on a good day.
For years.
Time marched on. Students came and went. My family got bigger. And my parents were now gone. And I know I was in the middle of a deep depression after that, triggered by losing my mom at the relatively young age of 72 on All Souls Day in November, 2005, after years of the cruelty of early onset cognitive decline. There were flickers of mother Mary’s delightful self, and her eyes shone with love in those difficult years, but really, the pain in my heart just expanded every time I saw her. So as my visits to the nursing home dwindled, my guilt compounded. How could God be so cruel to this woman who devoted her life advocating for the powerless against ‘the powers that be’? I didn’t get it; I was so angry it was eating me alive; I was in an accumulating fog of rage. I got counselling, but I was still royally, royally enraged.
I trudged through that winter. I went through the motions of life, which became a chore. I ran away to the woods to work on a cabin to distract my thoughts, but I trudged through my days. To boot, I have also always been affected by this black dog labelled ‘seasonal affective disorder’, which generally strikes hardest in late February and most of March, when I seem to historically reach my lowest point, coming off the long northern winters that never seem to end.
Which also happens to be my birth month.
In retrospect, in the first quarter of 2006, despite the joys of being a much-loved husband and father and almost-worshipped educator and all that, I was just lost. And there’s a huge amount of guilt in feeling that, knowing you are blessed with all the former, and still feeling like you are simply okay with not being on the planet.
Just what was the point? I just wasn’t getting it anymore.
But this is what happened next.
Four years after that I posted the photos, six months after my mother had passed, and right around my 45th birthday, I turned to my computer as I was giving an exam, to check my email. It was early afternoon, and a ‘Lexie’ person in Australia had pinged me.
She wanted to tell me that she had been a seven-year old Dutch girl on the train.
She wanted to tell me that thanks to me, my school website, my posting of the narratives and photographs, she had found George Gross, and worked up the courage to call him out of the blue. They both had a cry. And now she wanted me to please send her a disc with the photos of the day of her liberation.
I was stunned. A tear ran down my cheek. I looked out of the corner of my eye. Good, the kids are still working on the test, no one looking this way.
Just what was this?
The following November―literally on the eve of the first anniversary of Mom’s death―I got another email from a professor of physics at Brooklyn College. He had been a six-year old Polish boy with his mother on the train. He too, wished to thank me, and even suggested that we should all get together, since by now we knew of three persons who had been liberated, and of course, the still living tank commanders.
The following April the deal was sealed when a retired El Al airline executive in New Jersey reached out to me, having been pointed to my website by a friend who saw it. He mentioned that he spoke to schoolchildren about his experiences as a German boy during the Holocaust. He was thirteen when he was liberated by those tank commanders and those soldiers.
Hmm, I began to think… why not? I plotted a mini-reunion at our high school for the second week of school, in September, 2007, before Red Walsh and his wife Dorothy would head to Florida for the winter. Ever since nearly freezing to death in a tank during the Battle of the Bulge, he just could not stand the cold. Carrol was curious, of course. He didn’t want honors and accolades, but he wanted to meet these men. A doctor from London who had been a six-year-old Hungarian child on the train would round out the gathering, also coming up to Hudson Falls, and meet Red for the first time in front of the high school students.
We started planning over the summer with a supportive school administration, and help from teachers and staff members. I knew a guy at the Associated Press out of Albany who had a keen interest in military type stories. He came up the day before to meet Walsh in my classroom as he told stories and bantered with my 10th graders. (Sixteen years later―three days ago―I found the pristine original Hi-8 recording of this in my archives at home stored in a closet area under the stairs, ha ha! Another miracle!)
His photographer snapped away. The reporter posted the story in the morning on Friday, September 14th, just as Walsh was greeting his new survivor friends with, ‘Long time, no see!’
They gave their testimonies that afternoon to the students, who thundered them with applause. It was another miracle, that this twenty-four year old exhausted soldier got to see the results of his actions sixty-two years later.
After our goodbyes, on Saturday I headed out to the big box store to buy a new desktop computer. The salesman, doing his job, tried to upsell me a monitor. He pressed the ‘on’ button. The screen flickered to life. And there, on the Yahoo! news page which was the monitor’s default homepage, my classroom came roaring into view.
There was Red, telling his stories to my students. The entire world now knew of our reunion. The trajectory of this story was about to take off. My life was going to change.
Before the weekend was out, the school servers had crashed from traffic trying to download the liberation pictures. I heard from 60 more survivors of the train, some of whom I would become very close to. I heard from Frank Towers, the soldier tasked with moving the people out of harm’s way. I heard from the people at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who asked me to apply to their prestigious Teacher Fellowship Program. I did. I was accepted, and we planned another reunion two years later that was even bigger, that would land us as the ABC World News Persons of the Week on September 25, 2009.
Two years after that, we did a final reunion at our high school. Frank and I worked together on ten other reunions in the States, and survivor’s daughter Varda Weisskopf in Israel engineered a reunion there with Frank and perhaps 55 survivors. To date, nearly 300 survivors have been located from the train―or, maybe more telling, several have found us.
With film director Mike Edwards and crew I have gotten to retrace Red’s journey, from Normandy, through France, and on to the liberation site in Germany. We got to Israel again to interview a dozen more survivors, with Varda’s invaluable help. I’ve gotten to see firsthand the miracles of this story playing out in the modern world. And now I am again unpacking the story, that I have learned over these years that just never has an ending. And as we will try to let the world know, the message of the film is one of hope.
It’s the story of the power of love, conquering time and space.
A portal opened a crack that warm afternoon on Coleman Avenue in Hudson Falls, and I stuck my foot in before it closed back up, and I went through the door. Sometimes the room went dark for a time. Sometimes a long time. But a sliver of light always appeared at the darkest times, beckoning me to push open to another corridor, another room with more doors, another pathway. It is the ebb and flow of the cosmos. Of life. And it’s never-ending.
This is what I am learning, after twenty-two years.
I remember at that time in 2013 being upset at not being able to be at Red’s grave as the family, first and second generation survivors, and a fellow teacher representing in my stead laid him to rest (thanks Tara). But guess where I was that day? At the Bergen-Belsen Memorial in Germany, where I got to lead 20 other teachers in the Mourner’s Kaddish at the House of Remembrance. How unscripted. But how fitting.
“I think in my mind it is such an amazing thing that that our lives were joined in that moment on April 13th, 1945; all the years [that] have gone by since. We have had lives, families, jobs, whatever. And here we are again, and now we meet face to face and recall together that moment when my tank reached the train.“
Now, as we finish filming for the upcoming four-part miniseries of A Train Near Magdeburg, I am finally here at Red’s resting place. For the first time, ten years after his passing.
[RED, TO SURVIVOR] “You are always expressing gratitude to me, the 743rd Tank Battalion and the 30th Infantry Division. But I do not believe gratitude is deserved because we were doing what we, and the whole world, should have been doing- rescuing and protecting innocent people from being killed, murdered by vicious criminals. You do not owe us. We owe you! We can never repay you and the Jewish people of Europe for what was stolen from you: your homes, your possessions, your businesses, your money, your art, your family life, your families, your childhood, your dreams, and all your lives. That is how I feel.“
[SURVIVOR]: “You know, I kept calling him my liberator. He says: ‘I am really not your liberator. It was my job. I just happened to be there.’ I said, ‘I do not care what you tell me. I mean, you are my liberator!”[chuckles]
Long time, no see, Red. The world needs heroes, my friend. Deal with it.
POSTSCRIPT: I’m dedicating this post to my young German friend Johanna, who was born near the liberation site almost exactly the time of my first encounter with Red Walsh. Thank you for keeping the memory alive. We are on a journey, and just remember, it ebbs and flows, and that is the way of the universe.
You inspire me.
Teaching History Matters 