Teaching History Matters

I recently had a chance to re-connect with a researcher from my days in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum fellowship program fifteen years ago. Filmmaker Mike Edwards and I and my wife Laura traveled to Washington, DC to speak with Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues Ellen Germain at the State Department, and the next day, we had a behind the scenes interview with my friend Steven Vitto in the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center.

In 2016, we interviewed Walter Gantz at his home in Scranton, PA, for the film. In the interview, he mentioned a traumatic event that stayed with him all these years.

Walter, then the 21 yr old us Army medic, recalled the night 15 year old Eva Klein died. He carried her to the morgue tent, and she was then buried in a mass grave, 10 days after liberation…

“We talk about nightmares and flashbacks. I never had any nightmares where I would scream, but there are two so-called flashbacks I remember and they stayed with me for many, many years.
[In the second] incident, 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 to 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 Klein 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.”

Steven tells me today that we have had over 150 correspondences since 2008 when I first approached his desk, mainly with him doing the deep dives into the documentation archives that opened up since that date. In 2016, at my request, he began to follow the documentation of Eva and her family, survivors desperate to get out of the DP camps. An American soldier compiled a list of the dead in the Hillersleben mass cemetery grave, including Eva, anxious that it not be lost as the Americans pull out due to planned post Yalta Soviet occupation. It is that 1945 list that preserved the names of those buried in Hillersleben, as evidenced by the plaque we found there when we visited in 2022.

Thanks to the efforts of Steven Vitto, we are going to try to find surviving family members, who would probably like to learn of the medic who cared so deeply for this girl.

Later, back at the hotel, we had a chance to debrief our journey a bit with the director. To go from being educators with, in retrospect, little background knowledge of the Holocaust, to growing and learning and traveling the world to the authentic sites, and being welcomed into survivors homes, and to share in the joy of reuniting and reconnecting people across time and space, and being reminded on this trip of the many supporters and kindred souls along our journey, has been a life changing experience. Look for the film in 2025!