Teaching History Matters

http://www.saraatzmon.com/

Here is the very first website of a survivor that popped up when I did a random search of “holocaust survivor art” to find examples for students for a project we are doing. I read her bio, and put two and two together ( in Belsen, liberated by the American Army near Magdeburg in April 1945), and sent her an email asking if she was on the train near Magdeburg…sure enough, can you believe she was on the train??? With her siblings we are now up to 33 survivors, I think… Sara lives in Israel.

“Sara Atzmon-Gottdiener was born in 1933 in Hajdunanas, Hungary, as the fourteenth of sixteen children. At the age of nine, her father and four of her brothers were taken to a forced labour-camp. The family was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 with a children’s transport. At the Polish border the train stopped, and, after a stay of some days, returned to a forced labour-camp in Austria. In the same year, 1944, her father died in her presence of hunger and depravation. At the end of November 1944 they spent four days for the second time, going through the disinfection camp at Strasshof. They were stripped naked and were “taken care of”… Half clothed, they were sent to Bergen-Belsen. They were made to stand outdoors there for long hours in the snow, during the appel. The small girl had a red child’s shoe on one foot, and a lady’s shoe with high heels on the other.

In April 1945 they were liberated by the American Army near the town of Magdeburg. At the age of twelve, weighing seventeen kilograms, Sara received the present of her life once more. Her father, Israel, three of her brothers, four nephews, her grandmother, brothers-in-law, uncles, cousins and many others had not returned from the camps.”

Sent: Monday, May 19, 2008 3:18 AM
To: Rozell Matt
Subject: RE: A Train near Magdeburg

Dear Matthew,

Yes I was in this train with my Mama and 11 brothers 1 nephew. Most of as, we arrive to Israel (Palestine) 3 months later. We survived, 13 from 16 brothers . Now we are 8 brothers . But, we gather[ed] in 2007, and we are now about 200 persons in the family. Most of them live in Israel.

Shalom from all my family

Sara Atzmon

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Scene #1: The morning of December 16, 1944. A lonely outpost on the Belgian frontier.

In subzero temperatures, the last German counteroffensive of World War II had begun. Nineteen thousand American lives would be lost in the Battle of the Bulge. “Hell came in like a freight train. I heard an explosion and went back to where my friend was. His legs were blown off-he bled to death in my arms.” The average age of the American “replacement” soldier? 19.

Scene #2: Memorial Day, sixty-plus years later. In a small town in the United States, it is a day off from work or school and it is the unofficial start to the busy summer season. We sit in our lawn chairs, we chat with neighbors and sip our drinks when the gentlemen with the flag march past.

The holiday known originally as “Decoration Day” originated at the end of the Civil War when a general order was issued designating May 30, 1868, “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” When Congress passed a law formally recognizing the last Monday in May as the day of national celebration, we effectively got our three-day weekend and our de facto beginning of summer.

Of the sixteen million American men and women who served in WWII, a half million died on the field of conflict. In 2007, over 1200 veterans of World War II quietly slip away every day. The national memory of the war that did more than any other event in the last century to shape the history of the American nation is dying with them. Incredibly, it comes as a shock to most Americans today that the “Battle of the Bulge” didn’t originate as a weight-loss term.

In the high school where I teach, I have been inviting veterans to my classroom to share their experiences with our students. As their numbers dwindled, I smartened up, bought a camera, and began to record their stories. We’ve spoken at length with a pilot forced to bail out at 28,000 feet of his flaming B-17 bomber, only to watch crew members die in the subsequent explosion and then be taken prisoner himself. We have had conversations with POWs who survived forced marches in brutal weather, and with Jewish infantrymen who were among the first to liberate the death camp at Dachau. We have met men who were handcuffed to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and who were assigned to suicide watch guard shifts there after fighting their way across Germany. We can imagine what it was like to sail eerily into Pearl Harbor 36 hours after the Japanese attack and see no lights except the USS Arizona still blazing with the bodies of hundreds of Americans entombed in it. We are with the torpedo bomber pilot as he takes off from the flight deck of the carrier USS Yorktown during the epic battle of Midway, and is forced to land on the deck of another carrier as the Yorktown burns and later slides to the bottom of the sea. We intently listen to a blind Marine describe what it was like to lose his eyesight fifty-nine years to the day of his being struck by mortar fragments, not once, but twice in the same day at Okinawa (and he told us that ” the hardest part was telling my mother”). Across a kitchen table I have discussions with other veterans, including a former 17 year old describing what it was like to share a foxhole with a headless fellow US Marine on Iwo Jima. My students and I are just “one person away” from the shock of Pearl Harbor, the chaos at Omaha Beach and the Huertgen Forest, the horrors of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Peleliu Island.

Sixty-plus years ago these men and women saved the world. I think about this: by the time my teaching career ends in 10 or 15 years, almost all of the survivors will be gone.

It’s not enough that I have an interest in their stories. I have long looked out into a sea of faces, some students mildly interested in what I have to say, but many others displaying a quiet and disturbing apathy about the past. What is infinitely reassuring and comforting to me, however, is that they all seem to have a genuine interest in a “real” connection with the past, with a person who becomes the ultimate source, because he or she was there.

These men and women have helped to spark students’ interest in finding out more about our nation’s past and the role of the individual in shaping it. On our website we have worked to weave the stories of our community’s sacrifices into the fabric of our national history. And that, to me, is what teaching history should be all about. After all, if we allow ourselves to forget about the teenager who bled to death in his buddy’s arms, if we overlook the sacrifices it took to make this nation strong and proud, we may as well forget everything else. Where will we be when there is nothing important about our past to remember? The answer is found in simple study of any other great civilization in history that allowed the collective memory of the past that once bound them together to be trivialized and blurred, to be eroded away and forgotten-

They’re not here anymore. This Memorial Day,

Remember.

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This online journal was begun to chronicle the unfolding of something very special in my career that is, I think, profoundly affecting my life and the lives of others- the re-connection of a train transport full of 2500 Holocaust survivors with the American soldiers who liberated them on April 13th, 1945 near Magdeburg, Germany.

I am the history teacher from a small rural town in upstate New York, USA who is caught up in the middle of it all. My students and I don’t have a high profile website, but if you keep reading, you will see that several people’s lives have been changed by it.

On this web log you will find my posts. The first, “Remember”, was written years ago as a reaction to the “commercialization” of the American holiday of Memorial Day. It kind of describes how my World War II Living History Project came about, and I am proud of the fact that it began long before paying tribute to this generation or conducting oral history became fashionable. It’s about time Ken Burns caught up with us.

The second, “A Train near Magdeburg”, is a brief summary of this special story, showing how the power of the Internet is changing lives.

You will also find several news articles that describe the Holocaust survivor/liberator reunion our high school hosted on September 14th, 2007, as a byproduct of this educational project. The Associated Press article by Chris Carola was picked up and run either in print or on the Web by almost every major newspaper in the United States, and many abroad, including the Jerusalem Post. The CBS Evening News even did a story on it.

In short order I was hearing from survivors who were on that train transport from every “corner” of the globe. These conversations and emails were full of emotion, and I try to imagine the feelings as many of them contacted their actual liberators for the first time. Of course I can’t- only they can. Yet in speaking to many of them it is apparent that April 13th, 1945 was the day they were reborn. Some have actually discovered themselves in these amazing photographs taken on that day. The detail that many of them remember is amazing. And as one of them told me yesterday, the gratitude they feel is indescribable.

What follows is the unfolding of this story. I hope you will find them as moving as I have. Let me know what you think.

Matthew Rozell
Spring, 2008
marozell@hfcsd.org

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“A Train Near Magdeburg”

NOTE: In 2001 my students and I began to post interviews that we had conducted with World War II veterans  at our school website, http://www.hfcsd.org/ww2/Two of our veterans had described this incident, and one of them had taken photographs of it. Four years went by, and we heard from a grandmother in a far away country who had been a seven year old girl aboard this train. Then more survivors began to contact us, and today we are aware of over 200 survivors who have now made contact with each other and their liberators through the efforts of this school project.

We have organized several reunions for them.

This story takes place in the closing days of World War II, asAmerican and British forces pushed into Germany from the west and the Soviet Red Army closed in from the east.

On the morning of Friday, April 13^th, 1945, the US 9th Army was fighting its way eastward in the final drive through central Germany toward the Elbe River. A small task force was formed to investigate a train that had been hastily abandoned by German soldiers near the town of Magdeburg, Germany.The boxcars were filled with Jewish families that had survived the infamous concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen and were now being transported away from the advancing Allies to another death camp location.Scores of children were among the prisoners.

Two tank crews were charged with guarding these newly liberated people until the tanks could be relieved and the people could be properly cared for. By the afternoon of the 13th, one tank alone was responsible for safeguarding 2500 refugees. A small guard of emaciated Finnish soldiers who were also liberated that day set up the perimeter guard. The American tank commander had a small Kodak camera. He took several photographs that day of the newly freed men, women and children and spent some time talking to them through one of the survivors who spoke English. The following morning he was relieved, but the events of that day were never far from his thoughts. Later, he wrote them down for posterity, and filed them away with his photographs.

Sixty-plus years after the event, survivors all over the world who had been children aboard the death train are finding their rescuers’ narratives and photographs of the day of their liberation near Magdeburg in 1945 on an oral history website produced by a high school teacher, Matthew Rozell,and his students at Hudson Falls High School in upstate New York.

CBS Evening News Story

 ABC World News  Persons of the Week

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum film on our project

SUNY Geneseo magazine cover story

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Liz Bishop of CBS 6 Albany came up to our school twice to interview me and the students. My school principal (who, along with Dr. Gross, wrote a letter of recommendation for me) told me on April 10th that I am one of 14 teachers in the nation who will be attending the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellowship Program this summer! The Museum called me later in the day to congratulate me.

Her interest was piqued by the AP article below that appeared on March 27th.

Local Survivors of Nazi death train to attend WWII vets’ NC reunion

Several Holocaust survivors plan to attend a reunion of the American army unit unit that liberated them from a Nazi death train 63 years ago.

And a high school history teacher from upstate New York played a key role in reuniting the survivors and the veterans. Teacher Matt Rozell’s class project on World War II led to a reunion at Hudson Falls High School last September between several survivors of the train and an upstate veteran who helped liberate them.

Rozell says news stories about the reunion have led about 20 other survivors to contact him and offer their stores for his school’s World War II Web site.

Rozell is headed to Fayetteville, North Carolina for Friday and Saturday’s reunion of the 30th Infantry Division. Members of the unit’s tank battalion liberated the 2,500 Jewish prisoners from the Nazi train.

Rozell says the train survivors attending the reunion include a man who emigrated to America and went on to serve as a U.S. Army Ranger.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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Written on the 63^rd anniversary, to the survivors, and the liberators.

Two weekends ago about 15 surviving members of the 30^th Infantry Division met in Fayetteville, NC with five of the survivors whom they had liberated, as well as all the families.

I went with my 10 year old son, Ned. As you can imagine it was pretty powerful.

Here are links to a North Carolina TV news video and news photographs that were taken. I am also sharing a few photos taken by Rob Miller who was at the gathering and shared them with me. Blessings to you and yours…I hope to meet you all someday. Matthew Rozell

http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/2647639/

http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/HF80KExp0aw/WWII+Soldiers+Bergen+Belsen+Prisoners+Meet/NqKDrW_aLS3

Matthew A. Rozell
History Teacher/NHS Adviser
Hudson Falls Senior High School

Hudson Falls, New York 12839

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This statement was read at the reunion by my good friend and comrade in arms, Tara Sano.

Dear Matt, George, Carrol, Teachers, Students and my fellow Survivors,

I will never forget the day when I opened the Website of the Hudson Falls High School ‘WW2 Living History Project’, and before my unbelieving eyes I was looking back to 1945 – more accurately to April 13th 1945 – the day of my Liberation by the 9th US Army.

The 11 photographs before me were taken when I was 6 1/2 years old (younger than either of my two little granddaughters). The Train had stopped at the siding of the small station Farsleben, some 16 km from Magdeburg. I had been on this train with my parents and some 2,500 people all from the Camp Bergen Belsen. I had been incarcerated there from July 15th 1943 till April 7th 1945. In the camp we had the unusual classification of ‘For Exchange to Palestine’, most were classified as ‘Jew’. I think that this is the only reason that we were kept together and survived as a family for nearly two years in the most horrific of circumstances.

So now some 61 years on in January 2006, in front of my computer at my home, I was confronted with photographs of the day of my Liberation. I found this experience so raw and emotional that I screamed and then burst into tears. I studied the photographs looking and searching for myself. I thought that I could be one of the little girls, sitting in the group photo – I dismissed this for I assumed my mother would be somewhere nearby, but I did not see her.

I looked at the bleak, miserable geography of the site, the horrible train carriages, the skeletal human shapes – fortunately my memory is still a blank. I do not remember being in the train for 6 days, I do not remember being hungry or thirsty. All I remember is being out of the train, standing on the ground and watching the German guards fleeing and dropping their guns. I picked up one of these guns and before I could do anything – it was snatched from my hands. That is my only memory of that day. However, the events of the day are documented visually and that is incredible to believe. For no written words could describe so vividly the happenings of that day as do these 11 photographs. It is a historical miracle that Major Benjamin and Tank Commander George Gross had their small Kodak camera – and that on that day there was film left to use and record the day.

With today’s incredible technology anyone on our planet can see this photographic evidence of my Liberation. It is the foresight of that other man of goodwill – your History Teacher Matt Rozell that these photographs were posted on Hudson Falls High School Internet Website – for all to access.

Following a series of events, I have developed a warm email relationship with Professor George Gross, with Judge Carrol Walsh and Carrol’s daughter. It is a great joy for me to hear about their lives today and of their family happenings. The fact that this connection was made some 61 years after the event is very difficult to believe possible. But it is so.

The friendship I have developed with these two wonderful men has helped me to bring some sort of closure to that unfortunate time in my childhood. The interest they, as well as Matt, have shown in wanting to know my story has given me the encouragement I needed to write about some of my experiences. I did do so, and my story will be published in an Anthology of some twenty stories of the members of my Child Survivors group here.

Thank you Matt Rozell, for teaching your students about tolerance and the evils of prejudice. I applaud and compliment you on your good work. You have touched the lives of your students and a growing number of Survivors. You have also I think affected the lives of the two Liberators – George and Carrol.

Your history course on this Train at Magdeburg is teaching your students the evil that was perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust, against innocent people whose only sin was that they were Jews.

I hope one of the messages that your course has instilled in to the psyche of your students is that ‘Evil Happens When Good Men Do Nothing.’

I wish you all great success in your future endeavours.

Lexie September 2007

NEWS STORY OF HER DISCOVERY

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