Teaching History Matters

I was unpacking a box from my classroom last week, full of framed pictures and awards from my previous life as a classroom teacher of history and the Holocaust. Yes, I know it is February, and I ‘retired’ in June. I guess that it’s taking so long because some days I wrestle with the fact that I’m no longer in the classroom with the kids everyday. But I can tell you that students and teachers have been on my mind all week long, given the events in a Florida high school.

So I’m unpacking this box (and subliminally wondering why I am even bothering to unpack the box, now eight months down the line), dusting off the frames but noticing a few small yellow spots that don’t go away with a wipe, but can be scraped away with a fingernail. I’m curious, and then it all comes flooding back.

Oh yeah. It was from that day a few years ago when an enraged 18-year-old in my classroom (whom I had been walking on eggshells around all year long) suddenly sprang out of his seat like a coiled spring and hurled his books at me from across the room, narrowly missing me, and, rapid reload, fired his 20-ounce sticky breakfast energy drink which exploded at the horizon line above my head where the yellow painted cinderblock wall and ceiling met, spattering and raining sticky golden gunk everywhere. He turned and it seemed like he nearly tore the metal classroom door out of its frame, opening it with such a velocity that it ricocheted off the closet, and stormed out of the room and down the hall.

I instinctively walked quickly to the door, closed it, and locked it. My stunned students were quiet as I returned to my desk and called the office. And then I somehow managed to carry on with the lesson, until I could follow up the next period. Must keep things ‘normal’. But I was shaking. All I had done was ask him nicely, respectfully, and personally, three times, to stop texting during the lesson. I was gentle, quiet. I even said please. I don’t think the other kids even heard me, hence their stunned incredulity at the explosive reaction of the student. Later I insisted that he not be allowed in the vicinity of my classroom, and maybe I was lucky that my wish was granted. I’m sure I was lucky on many levels. I never saw him again.

All of this brought back what I have been thinking about all week. It was not my first brush with some level of threatening or violent behavior in the classroom.  We, kids and their teachers, administrators, deal with this enough so that the ‘what ifs’ are always present, but now they are again hurtling from the back to the forefront of our lives.

And so to my teacher friends, some of whom, hearts heavy, cried in front of their students this past week, it’s okay. You’re bombarded and pounded-again-but your kids know that you are there to listen to them. So that’s just where it is right now. You are there for them, and frankly, in this moment, they are there for you, too.

Now I circle back to that question-was there every really a time when I would not have put it on the line for my kids? Not at all.  And truth be told now, I always balanced a 3-foot-long piece of angle iron (left over from school construction) on my knees, when seated just behind the door, while the kids were huddled in the corner during the shooter drills. (Maybe it wouldn’t do any good, but it sure felt comforting to hold on to a heavy piece of metal.) And after a week of fumbling to find the right words, I read this article in the NY Times. Yes. Times like these I really miss my school family, and the beautiful human beings we nurture and cultivate. And kudos to Bruce Klasner, fellow Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program alumnus. I don’t know Bruce, but he nailed it for me.

Janusz Korczak memorial, Warsaw, Poland. I took this while on myHolocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program journey. Look him up sometime. And read below.

*********************

School Shootings Put Teachers in New Role as Human Shields
By JULIE TURKEWITZ    FEB. 19, 2018

TAMARAC, Fla. — The shooting was all over, but the emotional reckoning had just begun, and so on Saturday the teachers of Broward County packed their union hall to discuss what it meant to have become the nation’s human shields.

“Last night I told my wife I would take a bullet for the kids,” said Robert Parish, a teacher at an elementary school just miles from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, where a former student killed 17 people, including three staff members who found themselves in the line of fire.

Since the attack last week, said Mr. Parish, “I think about it all the time.”

Across the country, teachers are grappling with how their roles have expanded, from educator and counselor to bodyguard and protector. They wonder if their classrooms are properly equipped, if they would recognize the signs of a dangerous student, and most of all, if they are prepared to jump in front of a bullet.

In the last few days, teachers wrote to Congress, urging bans on assault weapons, and to state lawmakers, seeking permission to carry firearms to school. They attended local protests and reviewed safety plans with students. And in the evenings, they spoke with friends and family about an excruciating reality — that teachers, who once seemed mostly removed from the life-or-death risks faced by the ranks of police officers and firefighters, might now be vulnerable.

“I visualized what it would look like, and it made me sick,” said Catherine Collett, 28, a sixth-grade teacher in Northern Virginia who has spent recent days running through a thousand violent scenarios. “Could I empty out the cabinet and throw out the shelves and put kids in the cabinets? Is my better chance just barricading the doors? Can I move furniture that fast? Do I ask my kids to help me?”

Many teachers said even contemplating such worries felt far from what they had once imagined their challenges would be. As if the mounting pressures of test scores and email messages to parents and bus duty and hall duty and new certifications and all those meetings wasn’t enough. But the death toll has piled up — staff killed in shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 and now at Stoneman Douglas in Florida — and is forcing a shift in how teachers view their responsibilities.

“When I started teaching, I thought I was just coming in to teach,” said José Luis Vilson, 36, a middle school math teacher in New York City. Now he has come to view himself as a first responder, too, and added that instruction on topics such as conflict resolution and first aid would be useful.

Bo Greene, 56, a calculus and statistics teacher in Bar Harbor, Me., said the planning for dangerous situations had increased and grown more specific in the last year, even in her quiet school district. All of it feels jarring after decades in education, she added.

“I never had any of this,” Ms. Greene said. “We had the basic fire drills.”

Nowhere was the conversation among teachers more intense than in Broward County, where Stoneman Douglas is one of more than 300 schools, and Nikolas Cruz, charged in the shooting, had been among the district’s 270,000 students.

Laurel Holland, who was Mr. Cruz’s 11th-grade English teacher, said teachers in big public schools cannot possibly be expected to look into every student’s background to know if they have long been troubled. The year that she taught Mr. Cruz, she had more than 150 students, she said.

“There’s not enough time,” she said.

In the case of Mr. Cruz, she said, it was clear something was wrong. “He didn’t work and play well with others,” she said. “I was frightened.”

Ms. Holland eventually reported him to the administration, and he was removed from her class after one semester.

Inside the crowded union building on Saturday, educators held hands and shouted “Union strong!” before getting down to business.

How, they asked, were they going to stop the next one?

For hours they spoke of the golf clubs and baseball bats they would like to keep in their classrooms, of the bulletproof vests they wish they had, of the challenges of removing mass killers from their midst.

“I’m curious to know, out of the people here, how many Nikolases they have at their school?” said Elizabeth Sundin, 48, a teacher’s assistant. “Because I have one at our school.”

Outside, in the balmy Florida night, Mr. Parish, 51, of Broadview Elementary, was wrestling with the question of the class door. When an armed attacker begins to prowl, and a student is left in the hall, “Do I let the kid in, and maybe the gunman behind her?” he said. “Or do I not let them in and save the whole class? That’s a decision I can’t make.”

Inside, under the glare of fluorescent lights, Bruce Klasner, 61, of Everglades High was wondering why the district had not created a text message system that could send instructions in the event of an attack.

“I teach the Holocaust,” he shouted at the rows of exhausted teachers. “I taught them,” he said of his students, “about a man by the name of Janusz Korczak who walked into the gas chambers with his children because he refused to leave them. And after this happened my kids are sitting outside saying, ‘Mr. K, would you give your life for me?’”

Mr. Klasner said he would — of course. “I said, ‘Did you even have to ask?’”

In a corner, Andrea Suarez, 35, of Westpine Middle School was worried about her own students, who have special needs and often make loud noises, meaning it is almost impossible to hide them.

These days, she said her plan for responding to a shooting involves corralling the children into a closet, occupying them with snacks, and positioning herself in front of the closet door with a pair of sharp scissors.

“I’ve been having a lot of difficulty sleeping,” said Ms. Suarez, whose four children have been urging her to leave the profession. “I keep hearing kids screaming and gunshots in my head.”

Here in Tamarac, the union meeting was wrapping up.

Jim Gard, in cargo pants and a union polo, stood outside, amid palm trees. At 58, he has been a teacher for 36 years, he said, and works at Stoneman Douglas. When the shooting broke out, he was in math class, not far from where many were shot. He had taught Mr. Cruz, as well as two of the dead.

“You know, if I go through my college transcripts — master’s degree, doctorate courses, all that — I know for sure there are no courses that say: ‘Shooter on Campus 101,’” he said.

The Broward County school district announced on Monday that staff members would return to Stoneman Douglas at the end of the week. Classes are expected to resume on Tuesday, Feb. 27.

Mr. Gard said many of his colleagues were struggling with the idea of returning.

And yet, he said, “I want to go back. I want to go back to my kids. I want to go back to my classroom. I want to see the kids, I want to teach the kids — and that’s the bottom line.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/us/teachers-school-shootings

2017. Another year down.

I have not posted a lot since I “retired” but here is one I wanted to sneak in before the new year dawns. Actually I should have done it a long time ago, but the fact is it only came to light last spring. Deep in a filing cabinet, a copy of the very first yearbook of our school district emerged- exactly 100 years later. So I scanned it and here it is, in its entirety. Our yearbook staff used some of it in the 2017 Hudson Falls CSD yearbook. Thanks to some eagle-eyed staff members, it’s safe in the district vault now as well. There are actually two copies known now to exist. Believe me, I searched for them for years. The earliest I could find in the vault was 1919.

I could ramble on about its significance to our community, but I will let the pages speak for themselves now.  Most of the folks who get this notice in their email inbox signed up to learn more about the Holocaust, or WWII, or the importance of teaching history. But this is the community that raised my dad, and me and my brothers and sisters, and that my mom became a big part of. It’s the school that produced yours truly and many fascinating people. It’s where I spent my career, and did the things you come here for. It’s also a snapshot of an American small town 100 years ago. And for my ‘former’ school community, this is me, Mr. Rozell, still here, charging up the parapet on the last day, and holding the fort.

Hermes. The messenger of the gods. I hope you enjoy it-I compressed it to 10MB I think- Have a wonderful 2018, but here is to 2017, and 1917.

Click on the cover photo, or here to download. Catch you on the rebound. Have a great 2018!

Eight years ago tonight, we sat down for dinner at our farewell banquet and asked them to turn on ABC News. It was Friday evening after a three day reunion at our high school that included a dinner dance with American soldier liberators and Holocaust survivors on a steamboat on Lake George. This is what we watched together with students and family members.

In the opening sequence, Frank Towers is walking his wife Mary into the high school, and he says, ‘Here we are! We have arrived!’

65 years before, Carrol Walsh and George Gross did exactly that- arrived on the scene with their two tanks to save 2500 Jews from probable death. The next day, Frank arrived to transport those saved by the Americans out of harm’s way.

They are gone now, but thankfully got to meet and reconnect with over 275 Holocaust survivors and their families. What they did will last forever.

L-R- Sergeant Clarence B McGuire, Sergeant Maurice J Franzblau, Sergeant Fenton D Strohmeyer, Sergeant Guido Signoretti, Sergeant John Swarts. Source: John Swarts

I’d like to tell you a story about how this photo came into my possession.

I had never seen it before the end of this past August, just a week ago.  In fact, all of my life I thought that the man who sent it to me was dead, like everyone else in the picture. Even as I began my latest book, I had assumed everyone in my dad’s cousin’s B-17 was killed when their plane blew up 20,000 feet over Nazi Germany in the summer of 1944.

My dad’s cousin Clarence was a twenty year old waist gunner on the crew, clean cut, the one in the white T-shirt.  Many times I accompanied my dad on walks to the quiet cemetery a few blocks from our house. The memorial reads:

SGT. CLARENCE B. McGUIRE

A COURAGEOUS AND GALLANT GUNNER

WHO GAVE ALL FOR GOD AND COUNTRY

JULY 29, 1944

MAY HIS SOUL, AND ALL THE SOULS

OF THE GALLANT MEN WHO DIED, REST IN PEACE

Clarence McGuire, rear, tallest, center; John Swarts, rear, far right.

So naturally, for years I thought that all of his crew had died in 1944 when their B-17 was hit on a mission to bomb a German oil refinery. I think that is what my dad told me; I dug their crew photo—the only photograph I had ever seen of Clarence, to be honest—out from his desk after Dad passed. So imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I found the exact same photo, labeled, on the internet, at the American Air Museum in Britain. Then I noticed that someone had sponsored the page, ‘in memoriam’, and it was the same name as one of the crew. A son, perhaps?

No. I tracked the tail gunner in Florida, and mailed him a letter to what I hoped was the right address, hoping that maybe he was still alive.  Well, he called me shortly thereafter.

‘‘This is John Swarts’, said the voice with the distinctive Southern twang. ‘Me and Clarence was pretty good friends.’ A pause. ‘You got it right, address and everything. I knew him well; I went with him to his home up there in New York. Me and him used to ride horse together; I got some pictures to send you. His mother used to write me letters afterwards.’ 

John hailed from Missouri, and later settled in St. Louis.

‘Things worked out right for me. Was married twice, got a boy and a girl. Spent 33 years on the railroad, and then had my own business. I’ll be 93 on February 3rd. But it was just me and the co-pilot who survived that day. I was burned in the eye and didn’t go on the last mission.’ 

The plane went down on July 29th, 1944. This last weekend in July of 2017, the 73rd anniversary was upon us as we spoke.

‘The name of the plane was Pugnacious Ball. Flak got the plane. Blew up before it hit the ground. But I think they recovered a body bag to send home to his mother.’ 

‘I watched for the planes coming back; you always do when they are out on a mission. You count them. We waited and waited. They didn’t come back.’

‘It was the worst day of my life. Still is.’

John also sent me newspaper clippings. ‘Vet Feels Guilty Because Buddies Died’, declares one. ‘I feel so guilty. They were buried in Germany the same day they were shot down.’

And he sent me the picture I had never seen before, labeled in his hand, five friends for life smiling for the moment, smiling for eternity, though the kid in the back looks more reserved, almost as if he is already carrying the burden that will haunt him in some ways forever.

My new book starts with the kid on the far left in the photograph (Clarence), and ends with the one in the back, on the far right (John), 73 yrs later. So I went back to the cemetery where I had visited with my father many times in my boyhood, and left a simple note, and my book.

John Swarts, Washington DC, Honor Flight recipient.

I found him, Clarence, or maybe John had rediscovered you, somehow, through me. But he did not forget you, and neither will anyone who reads John’s words:

‘I get a little emotional. I’m almost 93; I hope to see them all again in heaven.’

You can read more in The Things Our Fathers Saw- VOL II, Book One: War in the Air here.

My third book is now available as an ebook. The paperback should be out by first week of September.

It is the story of eight airmen as they grew up during the Great Depression and then joined the US Army Air Forces and took to the skies over Europe. Each man held a different crew position on the ‘heavies’, the B-24 Liberator or the B-17 Flying Fortress. Most had a connection to ‘Hometown USA’, a name coined during WWII for Glens Falls, NY and the surrounding environs and small communities that lined the Hudson River 200 miles north of New York City.

Here is a story from Chapter Five.

The Navigator

Kenneth R. Carlson was born in 1921 in New York City. As a boy in the Great Depression, he spent his summers at Glenburnie at the Lake George Camp, the northern fringe of the communities surrounding ‘Hometown USA’. He called me at home one evening, shortly after I had returned from swimming near there.

‘Tell me about yourself, your family. I myself was from a middle-class family, but we were lucky in that I was able to attend what was probably the best private school in New York City. Incidentally, my tuition in grade school in the ‘20s was $250 a year; today a kindergarten slot is $45,000. I had a terrific education, even though I had to fight my way through the Irish gangs on 69th Street when I came back home from school.’

He tells me that the man who cuts his hair was an 8-year old boy in occupied France. He would look up, see the twin tails of the B-24 Liberators  coming or going to attack Germany, and wish them a silent prayer, hopeful that one day he would indeed be free.

‘I think what you are doing is very important. I still go to speak to the students here a few times a year; when we got out of the service, I joined the 8^th Air Force Historical Society here in New York and vowed to speak to kids. At 96, I’m still keeping that commitment. Years ago the Smithsonian put out a book, High Honor, of inspirational stories with World War II veterans, myself and twenty-nine other fellows. Get the book, but I wouldn’t try to contact any of the other fellows. I’m the last one left.’

*

I won’t bore you with other missions, but we were on the first three raids on Berlin. March 6, 1944, was referred to as ‘Bloody Monday’ because we sent 600 airplanes up and 69 did not come back. That was not the worst experience I had because our group was not damaged. A lot of groups were, so we were very fortunate. But on our eighth mission we were sent to Freiburg in southern Germany, near the Swiss border. And it was there, just as we were going over the target…

Flak

Let me tell you a little about flak. I have carried this with me ever since, because this is what flak looks like [digs into jacket pocket, pulls out a jagged flak fragment about the size of two fingers].

This is a piece of flak from a German 88mm artillery shell, which is fired from the ground and explodes at 25,000 feet, which is where we were flying. It is designed to destroy the plane or the engines or blow up the gas tank. And on my eighth mission, just as we were flying over the target, through these black clouds of exploding shells that you had to fly though, and just as the bombardier released our bombs I hit the salvo handle, a handle right next to the instrument on the navigation table. That would release the bombs in the event that the bombsight did not release the bombs. The second the bombardier says, ‘Bombs are away’, the navigator hits the salvo handle so if any bombs did get hung up, they would automatically go when you hit the salvo handle. So as I hit that handle this piece of flak nearly took my right arm off. And all I felt was no pain, just the feeling that someone had hit me with a sledgehammer. I felt total peace. It was the most unbelievable experience I’d ever had in my life. I didn’t talk to God or see God, but I had absolutely no fear.

I looked down and there wasn’t much left of my right arm; I saw it hanging there. I called the pilot and asked him to send somebody down to put a tourniquet on. Meanwhile I was checking instruments, because now we were on our way back and navigating was part of what I had to do, and I was still capable of doing it; I had no problem with it. The radio operator came down, took one look at it, and fainted. So I called again and the engineer came down. He revived the radio operator and sent him back with his portable oxygen mask. He then put the tourniquet on and stayed with me for the three or four hours it took to get back to base. An engine was on fire. Joe put the fire out and we lost a second engine. He brought it back, we landed, and I was brought to the hospital. They repaired my arm. I was on the operating table for eight hours. I didn’t wake up for 72 hours due to an overdose of pentothal, which was the drug they used in those days.

While I was in the hospital, our plane had 150 holes in it [to be patched up], and the crew was given a leave to go to London and relax. Joe came in and brought this piece of flak to me. [It had been lodged] in the instrument panel and it had a piece of my wire suit and my blood on it. So it took part of my arm and then went on to demolish part of the instrument panel. Joe said to me, ‘Sorry you are so unlucky, Navigator. We’re going to miss you’, because there was no way I was going to fly again.

They came back from leave to fly the repaired airplane on the next mission, and they flew and they never came back. The crew next to them saw them explode, just like the Space Shuttle did on my 65^th birthday. They were officially declared missing; [only] one parachute was seen coming out. For years I assumed they were missing rather than the fact that they were killed. About two years later, the government declared them killed in action. But up until about four or five years ago, [it was assumed that] there were no bodies ever recovered, because there was no indication otherwise. Then, through a German internet source, I discovered that they had been found by the Germans and were buried in a small German-occupied cemetery just north of Paris, but there were only body parts and one piece of wing that had a star on it. That was their identification. So they [turned out to be] in a cemetery in a little town northwest of Paris.

That was the end of my combat career. My arm was repaired by a doctor who, by fate, I met thirty years later. When my hand began to contract again I was sent to an orthopedic man. As I was sitting across from him he was questioning me about where this had happened, and he was the doctor who originally had put my hand back together again. He was the only doctor in that hospital which had just opened the week before I was shot.

*

[After the war, I did not go to reunions.] I had lost my crew and it was something I didn’t talk about for many years. I had no desire to go back and share memories with crews that had survived. It wasn’t until much later that I decided to do this book for reasons that it would be helpful to young people in understanding what World War II was like. Not so much understanding it in its entirety, but how it affected individual people’s lives. It wasn’t until then that I had any real reason to try and recapture people who had been there. Then I joined what is called the 8^th Air Force Historical Society. And through that I have maintained contacts at both the national level and at the local level in New York City. I found that very rewarding.

[I think my time in the military affected me] in a very dominant way. People talk about religion and believing in something; the moment of truth comes to you. I was raised and schooled in the Christian church. I don’t go to church anymore, but I do have the faith that came to me when this piece of flak hit me. There was just no question in my mind that I was coming home, and that I was going to be safe and go to work and just do the job that I had to do. It is a feeling that has stayed with me all my life. So, from that standpoint, there is no fear. So many people today seem to be afraid of so many things. The fear of doing things or fear of failing has never been with me since I left the service. I have continued to look at my own life as one of missions, a series of missions and not just adventures, and it has worked for me.

*

Ken Carlson, first row second from right, and the crew of ‘Myrtle the Flying Turtle’. Credit: Ken Carlson.

There is a photo of me and my crew taken in 1943. [Pointing out crew]—Frank Caldwell was the bombardier, from Anderson, IN; ‘Johnny’ Johnson, the co-pilot, from Houston, TX; Joe Roznos, the pilot, my greatest friend, from Hollywood, CA; ‘Wally’ Waldmann, waist gunner, from Houston, TX; Hal McNew, waist gunner, from Montana; Ed Miller, tail gunner, from Wyoming; Frank Dinkins, the engineer; John Rose, ‘Rosie’, our ball turret gunner—he could shoot a squirrel, or a German fighter pilot, from his shoulder or his waist, it didn’t make any difference; and Cleo Pursifull, our radioman. He is the one that came to help me and fainted. And he failed to go on that last mission. He had just had enough.

The thing that haunts me is that I can’t put a face to the guy who replaced him. He was an 18-year old Jewish kid named Henry Vogelstein from Brooklyn. It was his first and last mission. And when you think about it, an 18-year old boy was put as a replacement in a crew that he did not know; we were an all Christian crew. We all had our little New Testament that the Air Force gave us and he would have been given an Old Testament. He made his only mission with a crew of strangers. Now that’s bravery!

We all want to be free, but very few of us want to be brave. For all of us to be free, a few of us must be brave, and that is the history of America.