The Things Our Fathers Saw: 

The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation from Hometown, USA –

Voices of the Pacific Theater

288 pages

27th Infantry Division. Saipan, July, 1944.
New York State Military Museum.

‘I hope you’ll never have to tell a story like this, when you get to be 87.

I hope you’ll never have to do it.’

‑Marine veteran of the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima, to his teenage interviewer

At the height of World War II, LOOK Magazine profiled a small upstate New York community for a series of articles portraying it as the wholesome, patriotic model of life on the home front. Seventy years later, a high school history teacher and his students track down over two dozen veterans residing around ‘Hometown, USA’ who fought the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to the surrender at Tokyo Bay. They rescue and resurrect firsthand accounts of combat and brotherhood, of captivity and redemption, and the aftermath of a war that left no American community unscathed. Here are the stories that the magazine could not tell, from a vanishing generation speaking to America today.

About the Author

Matthew Rozell’s teaching career is now spanning four decades. He has been recognized as an OAH Tachau History Teacher of the Year and as a recipient of the NSDAR National Founders’ Medal for History Education. Rozell is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellow, has had his lessons filmed for NBC Learn and the New York State United Teachers, and has even been selected as an ABC World News ‘Person of the Week’. He is also a recipient of several state and local awards for history education.

Receive regular updates by ‘liking’ the Facebook page at the bottom of our HOME page or visiting it at  AuthorMatthewRozell

The first author appearance is scheduled in Hudson Falls, NY, one of the book’s settings,  for August 8th , 1-4pm, at the Village Booksmith.

Address: 223 Main St, Hudson Falls, NY 12839
Phone:(518) 747-3261

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This was published in the Washington Post this week. The link is at the bottom. I repost it for noting the methodology, given some earlier articles about this topic. You can go to the original link to see comments. MR

Has the global Jewish population finally rebounded from the Holocaust? Not exactly.

By Adam Taylor July 2, 2015, Washington Post

In 1939, the global population of Jewish people worldwide peaked at around 16.6 million. That population was soon decimated by the Holocaust, which saw Nazi Germany and its collaborators kill approximately 6 million Jews. In just a few horrifying years, the global population of Jews had fallen by more than a third.

This week, a new report by the Jerusalem-based think tank Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) made a startling announcement: The world’s Jewish population was finally approaching 16.6 million again. The announcement sparked headlines around the world, with many observers shocked that it could have taken 70 years for the global Jewish population to return to its pre-Holocaust peak.

The problem is, it wasn’t entirely accurate.

Professor Sergio DellaPergola, perhaps the most well-known expert in Jewish demographics in the world today, is among those who have rebutted the reports. “It is a canard,” DellaPergola told the Times of Israel this week, suggesting that the numbers widely reported were both a result of “misunderstanding” and “journalistic counterfeit.”

When you look closely at the JPPI’s numbers, DellaPergola’s objections make sense. The report makes no bones that the number of self-identifying Jews in the world are around 14.2 million – a number DellaPergola had come to in his own work last year, published

It then, however, adds on to this a number of other people, including those with only one Jewish parent or those who identify as partially Jewish due to their family history. Some 348,000 Israeli citizens who came to Israel under the Law of Return but are not recorded as Jews are also included in the higher figure.

Traditionally, Judaism has a comparatively strict definition of who is Jewish, with halakha (Jewish religious law) requiring either that a person’s mother was Jewish or that they go through a formal conversion process. Not all Jews agree with these definitions, however. The Law of Return, an Israeli legislation that allows Jews to immigrate to Israel, was amended in 1970 to allow “child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew” to enter the country, leading hundreds of thousands of non-Jews to move to Israel.

In a phone call earlier this week, JPPI president Avinoam Bar-Yosef was keen to emphasize that the higher figure included these people, who others might not consider fully Jewish, in order to help with policy discussions (the JPPI report was presented to the Israeli Cabinet on Sunday). The JPPI report argues that there were “changing patterns of Jewish identification” in the past few years, hence the use of the larger number. Indeed, a 2013 Pew study on the nature of Jewish Americans found that more and more people could be considered “partially Jewish,” in part due to the shifting attitudes to intermarriage and religion.

DellaPergola’s own estimates of the world’s Jewish population have made a point of not including these people, noting that if “we add persons who state they are partly Jewish and non-Jews who have Jewish parents, an extended global aggregate population estimate of 17,236,850 is obtained.” DellaPergola disagrees with using these broader definitions, however: “If the United States had 6.7 million holders of a doctorate, and 1 million of these hold a doctorate partly, how many Ph.D.s are there in America?” he asked in the Forward in 2013.

So when will the core Jewish population actually reach its pre-Holocaust heights? Recent estimates by Pew found that the world’s Jewish population would rise by 15 percent in the next two and a half decades, compared to 35 percent for the overall global population, to reach 16.1 million in 2050. DellaPergola’s research has suggested that, had the Holocaust not taken place, the global Jewish population would have been at least 26 million and possibly as much as 32 million today.

Adam Taylor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Originally from London, he studied at the University of Manchester and Columbia University.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/07/02/has-the-global-jewish-population-finally-rebounded-from-the-holocaust-not-exactly/

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Five Sydney women, who were little children in April 1945, were  traveling on a train en route from Bergen-Belsen to Thereseinstadt when it was abandoned by the Germans and discovered by the advancing U.S. forces. 

Around the table l-r: Ilonka Blair, Judith Handley, Eva Reed, Lexie Keston. Ana Deleon  and Lea Farkas    Photo: Gaby Deleon

The five recently were joined by a sixth survivor to commemorate the 70th anniversary of their rescue by the U.S. troops.

It was the first time the five passengers in the abandoned train had sat down together.

Six years ago J-Wire told the story of the rescue when some of those liberated as children met their liberators for the first time.

You can read it here…   http://www.jwire.com.au/a-school-holocaust-project-re-unites-liberated-with-liberators/

Judith Handley,  Eva Reed,  Lexie Keston, Ana Deleon, Lea Farkas were joined by Ilonka Blair who survived Bergen-Belsen. All are members of  the Sydney Child Survivors Group.

The lunch, hosted by Ana Deleon, gave the women an opportunity to exchange memories of that April day in 1945 when German troops mysteriously disappeared having abandoned the train abandoning their prisoned in Magdeburg, Germany…only to be replaced by the advancing Americans troops who were to liberate them.

Lexie Keston told J-Wire: “Our Liberation was on 13 April 1945.  We were liberated by the 9th US Army Tank brigade, at Farsleben which is 16 km from Magdeburg in Germany.  Apart from  Ilonka Blair  who was liberated at the Bergen-Belsen Camp we were all on a train from Bergen-Belsen and had been travelling since the 7th April. Ana Deleon organised our re-union lunch to celebrate 70 years since our Liberation.  Amongst our little group, we had girls from Hungary, the former Yugoslavia and Poland.”

Judith Handley and Lea Farkas were new to the group having been “discovered” living in Sydney by Ana Deleon. They have joined the Sydney Child Survivors group.

76-yr-old Lexie,  the “baby” of the group, added: “We had all gone our separate ways after the rescue as we had come from different backgrounds. Somehow fate has brought us all together.”

Frank Towers is the last surviving veteran of the 30th Division that had any hands-on experience with this event. He told J-Wire: “I have been in contact with Lexie and Ana.”

http://www.jwire.com.au/on-a-train-to-australia/

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Dachau Will Always Be With Us

by Tony Hays

This is not so much a post about writing as one about a writer’s education, about one of those experiences that molds us, shapes us into storytellers.

My father, Robert Hays, was the son of an alcoholic tenant farmer in rural west Tennessee. If the appellation “dirt poor” fit anyone, it fit my grandfather’s family. Daddy served in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 30s. He and my mother, who was in the woman’s equivalent of the CCC, working as a nurse’s aide at Western State Mental Hospital in Bolivar, Tennessee, met on a blind date in early 1940 and married in September of that year.

But just over a year later, Pearl Harbor happened. America was in the war. My father was among the first of those drafted in 1942. I won’t bore you with the details, but he participated in the North African, Salerno, Anzio, and southern France invasions, saved by the luck of the draw from Normandy. But they slogged through France and on to Germany. On April 29, 1945, Allied troops liberated the Dachau concentration camp. I don’t know whether he entered Dachau that day or the next, but that he was there within hours of the liberation is beyond dispute. A few months later, after more than three years overseas, he came home.

In later years, he would talk occasionally about the war, providing anecdotes that showed the chaos and random chance of battle. He spoke of driving through Kasserine Pass in North Africa just hours before the Germans killed thousands of Allied troops in a stunning attack. He spoke of a friend, defending his position from a foxhole, who was thought dead after an artillery shell landed right next to him. When the dust cleared, the friend was buried up to his neck in dirt, but did not have a scratch on him. He spoke often of Anzio, where he was wounded, and of the massive German air assaults on those soldiers clinging to that tiny sliver of beach along the Italian coast.

But he never spoke of Dachau.

The bodies of former prisoners are piled in the crematorium mortuary in the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp. Dachau, Germany, April 29, 1945. USHMM.

Ever.

When he died in 1981, we found a photo in his wallet. An old sepia-toned shot like others he had taken during the war, pictures that he kept in an old brown bag. But this one was different.

It showed a pile of naked bodies. Well, really more skeletons than not, with their skin stretched pitifully over their bones. On the back, as had been his habit, was typed simply “Dachau.”

I was confused. Why would he keep this one photo in his wallet all of those years? Especially a photo of a place and event that he never spoke about. It obviously had some deeper meaning for him than the other photographs. If it had been a shot of the building he was in when he was wounded (hit by an artillery shell), I could have seen that. A reminder of his closest brush with death. Yeah, I could buy that. But this macabre photo? That, I couldn’t see.

So, for the next fifteen years, I remained puzzled.

Until the fall of 1996. I was working in Poland, and I had some time off. I took an overnight bus from Katowice, Poland to Munich. It was an interesting trip all in itself. We sat in a line of buses at midnight on the Polish/German border, waiting for our turn to cross, next to a cemetery, as if in some Cold War spy movie. I remember passing Nuremburg and thinking that my father had been there at the end of the war. And then there was Munich.

I spent a day or two wandering through the streets, drinking beer in the Marienplatz. I’m a historical novelist, so the short trip out to Dachau was a no-brainer. Of course it was as much my father’s connection with it as anything else that spurred the visit. But I’m not sure that I was completely aware of that at the time.

Dachau literally sits just on the outskirts of the Munich metropolitan area. I looked at the sign on the train station with a sadness, wondering for how many people that had been one of the last things they saw. It was only later that I discovered there had been another depot for those passengers.

The Dachau Memorial is a place of deep emotion. In the camp proper, mostly all that are left are the foundations of the barracks. One has been reconstructed to give an idea of how horrible life must have been. The camp was originally intended to hold 6,000 inmates; when the Allies liberated Dachau in 1945, they found 30,000. The museum and exhibits are primarily in the old maintenance building. I looked with awe at life size photos of prisoners machine gunned, their hands torn to ribbons from the barbed wire they had tried to climb in a futile attempt at escape.

I followed the visitors (I can’t call them tourists) north to where you crossed over into the crematorium area. It was there that the full brunt of what had taken place at Dachau really hit me. A simple brick complex, it seemed so peaceful on the fall day that I stood before it. But as I read the plaques and consulted my guidebook, as I stepped through the door and actually saw the “shower” rooms where the prisoners were gassed, as I stared into the open doors of the ovens, I felt a rage unlike any I had ever known consume me.
Covering my eyes, embarrassed at the tears, I slipped back outside. It took more than a few minutes to regain my composure. I thought then that I understood why my father kept that photo close to him for so long. It was a reminder of what one group of people had done to another group of fellow humans. The obscenity of it had overwhelmed him as it had me.

That night, I went to the famous Hofbrauhaus in Munich, to wash the images of the ovens away with some beer. I hadn’t been there long when an elderly American couple sat at the table. They were from Florida, a pleasant couple. He had been a young lieutenant in the American army on the push into Munich. In fact, it had been his pleasure to liberate the Hofbrauhaus from the Germans.

Of course, I asked the question. “Were you at Dachau?”

He didn’t answer for several seconds, tears glistening in the corners of his eyes as his wife’s hand covered his and squeezed. Finally, he nodded, reached into a back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

With a flick of his wrist, a photo, just as wrinkled, just as bent, as the one my father had carried landed on the table. It wasn’t the same scene, but one just like it.

Here was my chance, the opportunity to ask the question I had never been able to ask my father. I pulled the photo from my own wallet and lay it next to his. “Why? Why have you carried it so long? To remind you of the horror of Dachau, of what had been done here?”

His face carried the faintest of smiles as he shook his head. “No, son, to remind us of the horrors that we are capable of, to remind us not to go down that road again.”

The difference was subtle, but in that moment, I learned two lessons invaluable to a writer, subtle differences are important, and when you want to know the truth, go to the source.

As I sit here now and look at that same photograph, I realize that it was my father’s legacy to me, of Dachau.

Now, nearly 70 years after that day in 1945, Dachau is still with us, and I hope the legacy left by our fathers always will be.

Dachau, Seventy Years On; The Subtle Difference.

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