"for the sake of humanity"… A small town American high school history project changes lives worldwide. These are the observations of a veteran teacher- on the Power of Teaching, the importance of the study of History, and especially the lessons we must learn, and teach, on the Holocaust. Click on "Holocaust Survivors, Liberators Reunited" tab above to begin.
Yom HaShoah ceremony and service, Jewish Federation of greater Rochester, New York, April 15, 2015. 700 folks come out on a midweek night. From an audience member: ‘The most beautiful, inspirational Yom HaShoah service I have ever been to.’
It was indeed a moving service and I was honored to have a part in it.
We stop and we pause, to reflect and remember.
Key take-aways from my presentation:
The American Army was involved in a shooting war. More soldiers would die in the days to come. But they stopped. They helped these people. And some carried the trauma with them for the rest of their lives.
People need heroes. But few of the liberators would like to be remembered this way. Maybe we should all take a moment to think about our own obligation to humanity.
For every one person who was liberated on this ‘Train Near Magdeburg, nearly 2500 persons, keep close the reality that another 2500 perished in the Holocaust.
Finally, the voices of the eyewitnesses need to always be with us. We need to keep them close. Or forget at our peril.
***
Carrol Walsh, liberator: Our lives were joined at that moment on April 13, 1945, and now we meet face to face and recall together that moment when my tank reached the train.
Steve Barry, survivor:There is no other army in this world that would stop and help 2500 lice-ridden, emaciated Jews, to save them. What army would stop, except the American army?
Steve Barry: Mounted SS troops came around, rode by the train, and started to yell ‘Raus, Raus, get out of the train! Get out of the cars!’ And we saw them putting up machine gun nests. So obviously, even at that last moment, they were still trying to murder us.
Carrol Walsh: I had no idea who they were, where they had come from, where they were going – nothing. No idea. All I knew: here’s a train with these boxcars and people jammed in those boxcars. No idea. No, I had no idea.
Steve Barry: Very shortly after that we saw the first American GIs. Well, actually there were two tanks. I still get tears in my eyes. Right now I have tears in my eyes and I always will when I think about it. That’s when we knew we were safe.
Letter from Carrol Walsh to Steve Barry, 2008: ‘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.’
Steve Barry: Is this a beautiful person?
Carrol Walsh: I think, I cannot believe today, as I look back on those, on those years and on what was happening, I cannot believe that the… world almost ignored those people and what was happening. I cannot believe it. How could we have all stood by and have let that happen? We owe those people a great deal. We owe those people everything. They do not owe us anything. We owe them for what we allowed to happen to them. That is how I feel.
I’m speaking this evening in Rochester, NY. You should be able the watch the ceremony beginning at 7pm EST at this feed:
Through the Eyes of Liberators: History Comes to Life
Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance 2015
Matthew A. Rozell will be keynote speaker at this year’s Yom HaShoah program, providing fascinating insights in his many years connecting Holocaust survivors with their liberators – soldiers of WWII.
The Federation’s Center for Holocaust Awareness and Information (CHAI) presents our annual commemoration of victims and survivors of the Shoah, this year entitled “Through the Eyes of Liberators: History Comes to Life,” on Wednesday, April 15, 2015 at 7 pm at the Jewish Community Center.
Rozell, a teacher of history at Hudson Falls (NY) High School has provided students with life-changing experiences that have underscored his driving missions — to promote history and Holocaust education as something vital and alive and to foster a curiosity and attention to the suffering of others that leads to passionate involvement.
Rozell is recognized as a leader in World War II and Holocaust history. He and his students have personally interviewed more than 200 WWII veterans and have published many stories that would have otherwise been lost. He has been instrumental in reuniting over 275 Holocaust survivors with several American soldiers who liberated them from a train in Nazi Germany on April 13, 1945 and nursed them back to health. Rozell has organized or helped facilitate powerful reunions, witnessed by thousands of students. In 2008, Rozell was awarded a Museum Teacher Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for his work in Holocaust education; he has also been the subject of a documentary, “Honoring Liberation,” produced by the museum. His work has also been modeled in educational programs across the nation. In 2009, Rozell and his students were named ABC World News “Persons of the Week” by Diane Sawyer.
Learn more at his website,TeachingHistoryMatters.com.
Photo above: Moment of Liberation. Credit: Major Clarence L. Benjamin, 743rd Tank Battalion
Haven’t written you in many months now, its funny how a few moments are so hard to find in which to write a letter way past due; it’s much easier to keep putting it off the way I’ve done. I’ll try to make up for it in this letter.
Today I saw a sight that’s impossible to describe, however I’ll try. Between 2400 and 3000 German refugees were overran by my division during our last operation; most of them were, or had been, inmates of concentration camps, their crimes the usual ones, – Jewish parentage, political differences with der Fuhrer, lack of sympathy for the SS, or just plain bad luck. Not one of these hundreds could walk one mile and survive; they had been packed on a train whose normal capacity was perhaps four or five hundred, and had been left there days without food.
Our division military government unit took charge of them, and immediately saw what a huge job it was going to be, so they sent out a call for help. Several of our officers went out to help them organize the camp they were setting up for them. The situation was extremely ticklish we soon learned; no one could smoke as it started a riot when the refugees saw the cigarette, and we couldn’t give the kiddies anything or they would have been trampled to death in the rush that would result when anything resembling food was displayed. The only nourishment they were capable of eating was soup; now the army doesn’t issue any of the Heinz’s 57 varieties, so we watered down C-ration[s] and it served quite well. It was necessary to use force to make the people stay in line in order to serve them. They had no will power left, only the characteristics of beasts.
A few weeks of decent food will change them into a semblance of normal human beings; with God willing the plague of disease that was already underway, will be diverted; but I’m wondering what the affect of their ordeal they have been through, will be on their minds; most will carry scars for the rest of their days for the beatings that they were given. No other single thing had convinced me as this experience has that Germany isn’t fit to survive as a nation. I’ll never forget today.
I was going to write mother tonight but thought better of it. I’ll be in a better frame of mind tomorrow. I’m only a few dozen miles from Berlin right now, and its hard to realize the end is in sight. I’m always glad to receive your scandal sheet. You perhaps missed your calling, as your editorial abilities are quite plain.
As ever,
Charles.
March 11th, 2009
Dear Mr. Rozell:
My father-in-law was 1st. Lt. Charles M. Kincaid. He was a Liason Officer with the 30th. Division Artillery. He was honored with an Air Medal in the battle of Mortain and a Bronze Medal in the battle of St. Lo. In the battle of Mortain he won his Air Medal by calling in artillery adjustments while flying in a Piper L-4 over 4 panzer divisions on August 9, 1944.
He rarely wrote home. He did write home to his minister about one event that evidently really caused him to stop and think. Attached is a copy of that letter that his sister transcribed – making copies for others to read. The letter describes the Farsleben train and his experience there.
I need to thank you for your website and work. You and your students work enabled me to connect the letter with the actual historical event. It further enabled me to show my children the pictures and to make their Grandfather’s experience real, not just an old letter – that this event so affected him that he needed to tell his minister before he told his mother.
Friday the 13th. Today is the 70th anniversary, to the day.
This account comes to me from a survivor’s son who lives in Hungary. He had read of Carrol Walsh’s passing on the internet and contacted me. It is Carrol who is commanding one of these tanks. Sgt. George Gross commanded the other, and took photographs.
I just came across this website . My father was on this train.
He passed away twenty years ago, in April 1992.
Here is an excerpt from his memoirs about his liberation day.
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Translation from my father’s Memoirs pp. 302-304.
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The day of April 13 1945 was a Friday and a sunny and windy day. In the morning, the SS opened the doors of the freight cars, after they had argued with each other whether they should kill us with their submachine guns. But the US troops were too close.
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Perhaps it was an older SS man who prevented our execution. Later that day, a Jewish woman, who had been his lover in the camp, saved him from becoming a prisoner of war or worse. She got him civilian clothes, I do not know how. The same woman became the lover of an American soldier later.
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Several hundred people wrapped in rags streamed through the open doors, if they could be called people at all. We were all mere skeletons.
The train was idling in a deepening, so I climbed uphill, across a road and to a field. I was pulling out potatoes planted on the field, when a motorcycle approached. It was a motorcycle with a side-car. There was an elegant SS or Nazi leader in the front: I could not decide, since he was wearing a mixture of uniform and civilian clothes. It must have been his wife sitting behind him and his child in the side-car. He pulled over and offered me a cigarette. I told him I did not smoke, so he closed his silver-looking cigarette-case and started the engine.
He seemed to hesitate about the direction he should take.
Prisoner taken. Photo by tank commander George C Gross, April, 1945.
Then two small American tanks arrived. I was standing in the middle of the road, and noticed that the American soldier leaning out of the turret of one of the tanks aimed his gun at me.
The tank came closer and closer, and the soldier lowered his submachine gun. I must have looked terrible, so he did not take me for an enemy. I was lucky he had not shot me from the distance, since my small coat and boots vaguely resembled a military uniform. Lice were crawling all over my clothes and skin.
The few hundred former inhabitants of the concentration camp surrounded the tanks right away. Suddenly somebody remembered that the SS guarding us were still in the carriages. The SS were caught quickly, and lined up. The “intrepid” SS were trembling so heavily that their pants were flapping.
The first thing a Jewish woman asked from the soldier leaning out from the tank was money, and she received a dollar bill. She must have established her future with this dollar.
My attention was drawn to something else: in the rear of the tank there was a box of canned food. I climbed under the tank, emerged at its end, and pulled out a can. It turned out that I stole a can of oranges. This was my luck. I ate the potatoes charred in the can with the oranges, and probably this combination saved my life. Everyone who ate meat or anything greasy died within hours or within one or two days at the latest.
I felt fever in my body, undressed completely naked in front of staring women, and went into the ice-cold water of the lake next to the railroad. People warned me not to do this, but I went into the water, felt good, felt that I got rid of the lice and the burning heat of the fever. When I put on my rags again, I felt the fever ever stronger.
I asked an American soldier to sign the photo of my fiancee (I still have this photo). To my surprise, he signed the name Churchill. I thought he was joking. But he reassured me that his name was really Churchill.
(Once I read about a father named Churchill, who went to see his son’s grave in Vietnam during that war. The report mentioned that the father had been a soldier in World War II. He must have been my Churchill)
In the evening, there were news that we should flee, because the Germans pushed back the Americans. The Germans would massacre us for sure, the women had pulled out material for parachutes from a carriage in order to make clothes.
I was already so weak that I did not care whether the returning Germans would kill me: I stayed in one of the carriages, and fell asleep.
On Saturday, April 14, German peasant [horse-drawn] carts came for us by some order, so I was carried to Hillersleben. I dragged myself to the first floor of the first building, it looked like an office building, lay down under the sink of the bathroom, and fell asleep.
I am sure the American soldiers had no idea who we were and what we went through.
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First published in 2013. I am off to the last survivors/liberators reunion in Nashville Tennessee, this weekend.
Liberation, April 13th, 1945. Drawing by survivor Ervin Abadi. USHMM.
DEAR MR. ROZELL–I READ TODAY WITH GREAT INTEREST THE AP ARTICLE ABOUT THE TRAIN AND YOUR PROJECT…
MY MOTHER, SISTER AND I WERE ON THAT TRAIN . I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH YOU SOME OF MY MEMORIES.
THE FIRST SIGHT I HAD OF THE AMERICANS FROM INSIDE THE TRAIN WAS OF AN EMPTY VEHICLE SUCH AS WE HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE—IT HAD A GREAT WHITE STAR ON IT, AND SOMEONE-FAMILIAR WITH THAT STAR SAID:” THE AMERICANS ARE HERE” .
NOW I KNOW THAT IT WAS A JEEP—AND IT MUST HAVE BEEN ON A RECONNAISSANCE MISSION, AND IT WAS EMPTY MAYBE, BECAUSE THE SOLDIERS TOOK COVER, SEEING THE TRAIN.
I WILL FOREVER SEE THE WHITE STAR AND THAT AMAZING JEEP IN MY HEART—
SOON, THE SOLDIERS CAME AND TOLD US SADLY THAT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT HAD DIED THE DAY BEFORE ON APR 12.. THEY TOLD US, THAT IT WAS FRIDAY, APR 13, 1945—WE DID NOT KNOW THE MONTHS AND THE DAYS ANYMORE, LOST COUNT OF TIME IN BERGEN BELSEN.LONG BEFORE.
THE SOLDIERS CAME, AND WERE GENTLE AND GAVE US FOOD. FOR 2 DAYS WE SLEPT ON THE HILLSIDE—AND THEN WE WERE BILLETED INTO ABANDONED GERMAN HOMES IN A TOWN CALLED HILLERSLEBEN JUST OUTSIDE OF MAGDEBURG.
D.D.T. HAS A VERY BAD REPUTATION TODAY—- BUT I WILL FOREVER THINK OF THE D.D.T WITH A GREAT DEAL OF AFFECTION. WE WERE LINED UP, SPRAYED WITH DDT THAT KILLED THE MILLIONS OF LICE THAT INFESTED US. THE AMERICANS BURNED OUR RAGS AND GOD KNOWS FROM WHERE GAVE US CLEAN CLOTHES.
AS I WAS A CHILD I FANTASIZED THAT THE SOLDIERS WERE ANGELS, WITH THEIR WINGS HIDDEN UNDER THEIR UNIFORM SHIRTS.
TODAY I KNOW THAT THIS WAS NO FANTASY. IN THAT PLACE, AND AT THAT TIME THE AMERICAN SOLDIERS WERE ANGELS INDEED.I WAS 10, MY SISTER WAS 8. WE WERE HUNGARIAN JEWS.I, TOO HAVE MANY QUESTIONS FOR YOU, AND WILL CALL YOU SOON…
-I JUST CAN NOT BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING —THE AP ARTICLE —YOUR PROJECT—–62 YEARS LATER—
WILL YOU BE SO KIND TO FORWARD MY “TRAIN” LETTER TO MR WALSH AND MR GROSS. PLEASE TELL THEM THAT I LOVE THEM AND THAT IS NOT AN OVERSTATEMENT—
SO MUCH THANKS TO YOU, DARLING MATT
SINCERELY YOURS WITH MANY THANKS FOR YOUR PROJECT
AGNES B.
**********
a lovely reminder of the power of this project, one of many sent to me by survivors on September 15th, 2007.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower (center), Supreme Allied Commander, views the corpses of inmates who perished at the Ohrdruf camp. Ohrdruf, Germany, April 12, 1945. — National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md. USHMM
We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least he knows what he is fighting against.
— General Dwight D. Eisenhower, on visiting a subcamp of Buchenwald, April 12, 1945
April 4, 1945: The U.S. 4th Armored Division liberates the concentration camp at Ohrdruf, Germany, a subcamp of Buchenwald, the site of more than 4000 deaths during the previous three months. Victims were Jews, Poles, and Soviet POWs. Hundreds shot just before liberation had been working to build an enormous underground radio and telephone communications center. Very few inmates remain alive at liberation.
April, 1945: U.S. Generals Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, and Omar Bradley visit the camp at Ohrdruf, Germany, and view corpses and other evidence of Nazi atrocities.
In late March 1945, the camp had a prisoner population of some 11,700, but in early April the SS evacuated almost all the prisoners on death marches to Buchenwald. The SS guards killed many of the remaining prisoners who were too ill to walk to the railcars.
When the soldiers of the 4th Armored Division entered the camp, they discovered piles of bodies, some covered with lime, and others partially incinerated on pyres. The ghastly nature of their discovery led General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, to visit the camp on April 12, with Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf:
. . .the most interesting–although horrible–sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”
Seeing the Nazi crimes committed at Ohrdruf made a powerful impact on Eisenhower, and he wanted the world to know what happened in the concentration camps. On April 19, 1945, he again cabled Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could bring the horrible truth about Nazi atrocities to the American public. He wrote:
We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail. I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you could see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of Congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54’s, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps. I am hopeful that some British individuals in similar categories will visit the northern area to witness similar evidence of atrocity.
That same day, Marshall received permission from the Secretary of War, Henry Lewis Stimson, and President Harry S. Truman for these delegations to visit the liberated camps.
Ohrdruf made a powerful impression on General George S. Patton as well. He described it as “one of the most appalling sights that I have ever seen.” He recounted in his diary that
In a shed . . . was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench.
When the shed was full–I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January.
When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds.
Matthew Rozell is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellow and teaches history at his alma mater in upstate New York. This year, he is authoring a series of posts under the heading of ‘Seventy Years’, marking the 70th anniversary of the close of World War II and of the ‘liberation phase’ of the Holocaust. His work has reunited 275 Holocaust survivors with the American soldiers who freed them.
His first book, a narrative of World War II in the Pacific as told through the previously unpublished recollections of two dozen veterans, is due out this spring. His second book, in progress, is on the power of teaching, remembering the Holocaust, and this “Train Near Magdeburg’. He can be reached at marozell at gmail dot com.
{To commemorate the spring of 1945 and liberation seventy years on, I am posting the unfolding nature of the discovery of the Holocaust as Allied troops closed in from the East and the West.}
March 19, 1945:
Adolf Hitler issues the Nero-Befehl (Nero Order), a scorched-earth directive intended to leave only a ruined Germany for advancing troops. March 19, 1945:
Two hundred survivors out of 1000 Jewish women who began a forced march from the Neusalz, Poland, slave-labor camp on January 26 are evacuated by train to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, Germany; see this post.
My mother was one of the 200 or so that survived that “death march”! The survivors were transported to the camp at Bergen-Belsen, where my mother was ultimately liberated on April 15, 1945.
Many years ago, she did relate to me a wartime story of hers which I wrote up in 2006, and had published.
Prisoners on a death march from Dachau move towards the south along the Noerdliche Muenchner street in Gruenwald. German civilians secretly photographed several death marches from the Dachau concentration camp as the prisoners moved slowly through the Bavarian towns of Gruenwald, Wolfratshausen, and Herbertshausen. Few civilians gave aid to the prisoners on the death marches. Germany, April 29, 1945. — KZ Gedenkstaette Dachau. USHMM
The Defining Moment
By Joseph H. Danziger
It happened more than sixty years ago- and not to me- but I cannot dislodge it from my mind’s eye. My consciousness will not surrender the thought of what it must have been like for my mother, especially on one ominous day. I am a child of Holocaust survivors.
My parents, and thousands like the, each have personal stories of their incarceration in the various concentration camps that dotted Germany, Poland and neighboring countries during World War II.
My parents rarely shared with me their accounts of that desperate period of their lives. When prodded, they might offer an occasional vignette. Seeing the pain on their faces in talking of these experiences, however, I didn’t push for details. Those are memories they certainly preferred to have long forgotten.
Of the stories that were begrudgingly told to me, one shared by my mother will haunt me forever. The soul-searching decision with which she was confronted on that fateful day so long ago is unfathomable to me. As a result of the decision she made that say, I am here to tell the tale.
My mother spent the flower of her youth- ages 17 through 20- within the confines of a concentration camp in Neusalz, Poland. It was a women’s “slave-labor” camp where yarn was processed for the war effort. Although it was not one of the infamous “death” camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka or Sobibor, the distinction between these titles is hardly significant. In a death camp the aim was to kill as many and as quickly humanly possible. In a slave-labor camp the goal was, in effect, to work the laborers to death, with an ever-replenishing supply of labor. The death tolls in each were mind-boggling. The human skeletons who managed to survive all looked the same and had similar stories of deprivation, torture, depravity and the wanton taking of life.
In the midst of this living hell, an opportunity presented itself to my mother. She saw a possible means of escape. Despite knowing that if she got caught she would face certain death, she took the chance. She escaped, although she never explained exactly how.
Clad only in rags, she trudged through unfamiliar territory until she came to a house. She knocked on the door. She related her circumstance to the master of the house and pleaded for food and a place to hide. Although sympathetic to her plight, he told her he could not jeopardize his family. If found to have secreted a Jew, especially one who escaped from a nearby camp, he and his whole family would most likely be killed as a lesson to the community.
Yet, seeing my mother’s emaciated condition and dire need- and against his better judgment- he took pity on her. He invited her into his home, let her eat, bathe and sleep the night. Before the break of dawn, however, he said she must be gone. She thanked him and availed herself on his family’s kindness. For one night during a span of three years she had a full stomach, clean clothes and a restful night’s sleep.
She left before dawn, as promised. But where would she go? Only then did the truly desperate nature of her circumstance become apparent. For one such as she there was nowhere to go.
My mother was confronted with an unimaginable predicament, a sort of Gordian knot. Should she hazard freedom in an unfamiliar countryside filled with antisemitism where peril and betrayal would be her constant companions? Or should she attempt the inconceivable- a stealth re-entry into the camp from which she had just risked her life to escape- hoping the guards had not noticed her absence? As least there she reasoned, she had the known quantity of a controlled environment offering minimal subsistence, albeit in a horrific setting and under subhuman conditions. She chose the latter. In her mind, that choice offered the best chance for survival. As remarkable as was her original escape, doubly remarkable was her ability to re-enter the camp, unnoticed, and return to her quarters before the morning roll call.
With the memory of nearly one full day of freedom, my mother persevered. Then, in January 1945, together with 1,000 other interned women, she was set on a one-and-a-half-month forced to march to the concentration camp at Flossenburg, Germany, some 200 miles to the southwest. This was one of many so-called “death marches” that occurred toward the end of the war, in a calculated maneuver by the Nazis to deceive the Allies about the vast network of fully functioning concentration camps in operation during the war years.
Along the way to Flossenburg, 800 women were beaten, shot or left to die when they collapsed in the harsh winter. Upon their arrival, the remaining 200 women were transported to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. On April 15, 1945, the British and the Canadians liberated the scant number of those remaining. One of those was my mother. One year later, after surviving family members were reunited, she married my father.
I cannot imagine any other Holocaust survivor choosing a purposeful re-entry into a concentration camp after an earlier successful escape. The very idea is mind-numbing. But she chose wisely, for which her five children and six grandchildren are her testament. I will forever marvel at the immense resolve of this remarkable woman and her relentless insistence on survival.
(Article first appeared in THE PHILADELPHIA LAWYER , SUMMER 2006. Retyped by student Jana Putzig. Used with permission.)
Matthew Rozell is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellow and teaches history at his alma mater in upstate New York. This year, he is authoring a series of posts under the heading of ‘Seventy Years’, marking the 70th anniversary of the close of World War II and of the ‘liberation phase’ of the Holocaust. His work has reunited 275 Holocaust survivors with the American soldiers who freed them.
His first book, a narrative of World War II in the Pacific as told through the previously unpublished recollections of two dozen veterans, is due out this spring. His second book, in progress, is on the power of teaching, remembering the Holocaust, and this “Train Near Magdeburg’. He can be reached at marozell at gmail dot com.
The cosmos trips once more. This month, shortly after my previous post about the discovery of previously unknown artwork by Hungarian Holocaust survivor Ervin Abadi, I was contacted by the family of another American soldier who was at Hillersleben camp as the survivors of the train were being nursed back to health by the medics of the 95th Medical Gas Battalion. They sent me most of the drawings below [Monroe Williams credit, courtesy the Williams family], published here for the first time.
Abadi’s recently discovered artwork matches that of his previously known work, some of which is housed in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Ervin Abadi, Typhus. USHMM Collection. Probably completed at Hillersleben DP Camp, May, 1945.
(If you suspect that you have any of Abadi’s art in your family, or if anyone remembers his time at Hillersleben or Bergen Belsen, please drop me a line at the bottom.)
He was driven to express his gratitude for the American soldiers who freed him from the train, brought him to the hospital at Hillersleben, nursed him back to health and protected him in his stay at the displaced persons camp. These important drawings are proof of that, and confirm his dedication to feverishly recording everything that he could about those days. He drew his surroundings, his memories of the horrors of Bergen Belsen, and the beautiful young American soldiers around him, and even their precious photos of loved ones in their wallets!
In his words:
“Let these drawings serve as proof of my everlasting gratitude towards those to whom I owe my life. … To the soldiers of the United States Army, particularly to our immediate liberators, those soldiers of the 9th regiment who first entered the village of Zilitz and gave us bread, milk, chocolate, and cigarettes….”
American soldier at Hillersleben, ‘Man’. Ervin Abadi. Completed at Hillersleben DP camp, May, 1945. Soldier Monroe Williams collection.
American soldier-medic at Hillersleben. Ervin Abadi. Completed at Hillersleben DP camp, May, 1945. Soldier Monroe Williams collection.
A kapo inflicts a beating at Bergen-Belsen. Ervin Abadi. Completed at Hillersleben DP camp, May, 1945. Soldier Monroe Williams collection.
The American hospital at Hillersleben. Ervin Abadi. Completed at Hillersleben DP camp, May, 1945. Soldier Monroe Williams collection.
Soldier Monroe Williams’ parents. Probably sketched from wallet photo. Ervin Abadi. Completed at Hillersleben DP camp, May, 1945. Soldier Monroe Williams collection.
Ervin Abadi. Completed at Hillersleben DP camp, May, 1945. Soldier Monroe Williams collection.
The ‘casino’ at Hillersleben. Ervin Abadi. Completed at Hillersleben DP camp, May, 1945. Soldier Monroe Williams collection. Note Red Cross tents in foreground. May have served as temporary morgue station.
Former hospital at Hillersleben today. (Christian Wolpers photo.)
Former American medic Walter Gantz called me out of the blue 3 years ago. Like all of the soldiers now reappearing in Abadi’s drawings, he was there. A couple newspaper articles appeared about Walter’s experience at Hillersleben shortly thereafter. I put survivors in touch with him:
By the fall of 1944, the 95th [Medical Gas]Battalion was stationed at the Belgian-German border.
That winter, Mr. Gantz helped treat the wounded at the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes region, and by the spring of ’45 his unit had made its way into Germany.
In mid-April, they were in the town of Hillersleben setting up a displaced persons hospital when the Allies came across a train that had come from the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, where over 35,000 people, the vast majority of them Eastern European Jews, had died of typhus during the first few months of that year.
All told, there were roughly 2,400 emotionally damaged, disease-ridden and terribly malnourished people aboard the train. “Walking skeletons” was an apt description, according to Mr. Gantz.
“We weren’t knowledgeable about these (concentration camps) at the time,” said Mr. Gantz, who visited Bergen-Belsen days after it was liberated. There, he saw countless dead bodies “strewn everywhere.”
“It was hard to explain,” he said. “I cried. And then I prayed for these people. Not only were you angry about what happened, but you felt so helpless.”
Mr. Gantz’s unit spent about six weeks treating the survivors. A good 70 or 80 of them died, mostly of typhus. Among the biggest challenges was acquiring enough food supplies to feed them all. Many could only take their nourishment intravenously.
“A lot of them, if you were to give them food, they would gorge themselves and kill themselves. You had to be very careful as to what they ate,” he said. “Boy, oh boy, they would scream. Those screams would go right through your body.”
Blessed – or maybe cursed – with a terrific memory, he can vividly recall the screams and overall sense of dread permeating the hospital, where he and his fellow medics wore a daily uniform of surgical masks, gloves and rubber aprons.
He remembers scooping handfuls of lice out of patients’ hair and administering countless needles and the time he had to carry the body of a little girl to a tent serving as a makeshift morgue.
“I still get flashbacks to that,” he said.
Many died, mostly of typhus. Among the biggest challenges was acquiring enough food to feed them all, since a good portion of them could only take their nourishment intravenously. One of the survivors Mr. Gantz has spoken with, Lexie Keston, now a resident of Australia, told him she weighed just 30 pounds at the time of the rescue. She was 8 years old.
As a result of Mr. Rozell’s [work], a handful of Bergen-Belsen survivors have been in touch with Mr. Gantz, including Ariela Rojek, a Toronto resident who was 11-1/2 years old at the time of the rescue.
Mrs. Rojek, a Pole who lost all but an aunt during the Holocaust, was among those suffering from typhus. She spent three weeks in semi-consciousness, and remembers having to be tied to the bed by medics trying to restrain her. Mr. Gantz could have been one of them, she said.
“Those soldiers, they gave me my life. Because I was very sick,” she said.
“It was tough. Some of our guys couldn’t take it,” Mr. Gantz said. “I have to admit, I did a lot of crying. I tried not to do it around the patients.”
Now, though, he has the peace of mind of knowing firsthand that, despite all the horrors, life did go on for the survivors of Bergen-Belsen, just as it did for him and his fellow veterans. Asked once by a friend what he took from his wartime experience, Mr. Gantz thought for a moment, then replied, “It made me stronger spiritually.”
“I’ve been blessed,” he said. “I thank the good Lord every day.”
“He’s one of the angels,” Mrs. Rojek said of Mr. Gantz. “I’m really grateful. Whenever I get a name and phone number, I always call them. They gave me a second life.”
Mr. Gantz, 87, said the whole experience has made him feel “10 feet tall.”
“I have to use the word mind-boggling. I guess you’d have to put it in the category of a dream,” he said. “I have to be honest with you, it’s embarrassing. All they keep saying is, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’”
FINAL NOTE. We are also looking for this little girl, a survivor at Hillersleben. Her name was Irene. You can read the backstory here. Please contact me below.
Matthew Rozell is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellow and teaches history at his alma mater in upstate New York. This year, he is authoring a series of posts under the heading of ‘Seventy Years’, marking the 70th anniversary of the close of World War II and of the ‘liberation phase’ of the Holocaust. His work has reunited 275 Holocaust survivors with the American soldiers who freed them.
His first book, a narrative of World War II in the Pacific as told through the previously unpublished recollections of two dozen veterans, is due out this spring. His second book, in progress, is on the power of teaching, remembering the Holocaust, and this “Train Near Magdeburg’. He can be reached at marozell at gmail dot com.
Victory, 1945. By Ervin Abadi. Hillersleben, Germany, May 1945. Courtesy Chriss Brown, granddaughter of American soldier Don Rust.
The wires of the cosmos trip once more.
After almost exactly 70 years, a person came to this site on Jan. 30th with an inquiry:
I recently came across this site looking for a gentleman my grandfather became close to. My grandfather, Donald W. Rust of the 95th Medical Gas Treatment Battalion, helped him … and often spent time with him. The gentleman drew several pictures for my grandfather and I still have them today.
Donald W Rust of Kansas City KS. Hillersleben DP Camp, May 1945. By Ervin Abadi. Source: Chriss Brown, granddaughter of Don Rust.
We looked while my grandfather was still alive but were unable to find any lists of the survivors until now. We cannot read his name clearly but we think the drawer’s name is ‘Albadi’ or something close to it. I would love to share the pictures he drew and also would like to hear if anyone can help me contact the survivor’s family. My grandmother turns 90 in March and it would mean the world to her to know what become of him.
My grandfather told us the gentleman was from Poland, but we don’t know what city. Unfortunately, my grandfather could not remember his name. If anyone can help, it would be much appreciated.~Chriss B.
***
I immediately knew who she was talking about (though he hailed from Hungary, not Poland) and got in touch with her. She sent me samples, and sure enough it was Ervin Abadi, whose work I was very familiar with. He had even sketched a drawing of the liberation with the tanks rolling in, but unfortunately he passed away 22 years before I sat down to do my interview with one of the tank commanders in the drawing.
Liberation, April 13th, 1945. Drawing by survivor Ervin Abadi. USHMM.
The Liberation of the Train, Farsleben, Germany, April, 1945. Ervin Abadi. USHMM.
Dozens of Abadi’s pieces are at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and his bio there reads as follows:
In his early twenties when the war broke out, Ervin Abadi lived in Budapest, Hungary and wanted to be a painter. But, as with all Jewish males his age, he was taken to Russia by the Hungarian Army as a forced laborer. Abadi managed to escape but was captured after hiding out in the Karpet Mountains. After being brutally mistreated he managed to escape again, but was recaptured and taken to Bergen Belsen. When the camp was liberated by the US Army [incorrect: his train transport from Belsen to Theresienstadt] on April 13, 1945, Abadi was taken to a hospital in Hillersleben, where he recovered. While in the hospital (and possibly earlier in the camp) he made 25-30 watercolors, dealing with his arrival at Bergen Belsen, life in the camp and its liberation by the US Army. Abadi returned to Budapest where he told about his life as a forced laborer and and an inmate of Bergen Belsen in a collection of 30 ink drawings. The work was published in 500 copies with Hungarian and English captions in 1946. The foreword of the book says, in part, “Let these drawings serve as proof of my everlasting gratitude towards those to whom I owe my life. … To the soldiers of the United States Army, particularly to our immediate liberators, those soldiers of the 9th regiment who first entered the village of Zilitz and gave us bread, milk, chocolate, and cigarettes….” Abadi, however, became disallusioned by Communist Hungary and managed to leave for Israel in 1947 or 1948 where he lived in Israel for the rest of his life. There he wrote 15 books in both Hebrew and Hungarian. He died in 1979. [my emphasis]
***
Ervin Abadi’s name is also the first on the existing manifest list. Some years ago, with the help of Varda W. in Israel, his daughter got in contact with me, and sent me his DP [displaced persons] document from Hillersleben:
As you know, my father is a survivor from Bergen Belsen on the Magdeburg train. He got sick with typhus and was taken to the American Hospital at Hillersleben.
All my life my father told me to remember that he was saved by the Americans, and for that he will be grateful until his last day- and so must I, because if he was not to be saved- I wouldn’t be born.
My father passed away in 1979, and since then I tried to keep my promise to my father. I went to Normandy in France and walked the beaches that are soaked with the blood of the American soldiers and wanted to honor their memory, for because of them, I am living today.
A few years later I visited the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC. I met there an old gentleman and I found out that he was one of the American soldiers who fought on the beach on D-Day! I told him the story about my father and we both fell into each others arms crying. I felt like I fulfilled my promise to my father. ~Julia A. H.
**
So I dug out the letter, got in contact with Julia again, and put her in touch with Chriss, the granddaughter of the soldier who in befriending Abadi, helped him in his recuperation.
Raymond D. Rape of Zelienople, PA ; Grafton D Junkin of Kennedy, Alabama ; Donald W Rust of Kansas City KS. Hillersleben DP Camp, May 1945. Source: Chriss Brown, granddaughter of Don Rust.
From Julia, the artist’s daughter, last week:
I was very touched… 70 years after it happened, my father’s drawings came back to us.
We use to say that if his name is mentioned, a person lives forever.
Thank you again for remembering my father’s work of art.
The First Lesson I Really Learned as a First-Year Public School Teacher,
Though the Moral does not strike me for almost Thirty Years.
(subtitled, The Seven Simple Words: How having been labeled “INEFFECTIVE” as a young teacher would have stilled the ripples unfolding that will reverberate for generations.)
Where am I? And, more importantly, what the hell am I doing here? Taken by me, April 15, 2010.
Recently, the New York State United Teachers did a couple features on my work in the classroom. If you have any friends or acquaintances who would like to pass some of my musings on to some the younger teachers of the world, even the pre-service students, feel free. It’s time to let them know that it’s a journey, after all. The following post is an excerpt from a draft of my second book, which will be published someday after my first book is actually published. (See more at the bottom.) Sigh.
Gotta teach, after all.
*****
I got to ride the special bus.
*
Pulsing red and blue lights ricochet off the subterranean tunnel walls from which our bus is emerging, announcing to the citizens of our nation’s capital that our convoy of VIPs is arriving, like conquering heroes of old returning home after a great victory. And in a real sense, that is what we are. But Wow.
What the hell is a TEACHER doing here on this bus?
Washington traffic in all directions grinds to a dead halt as our convoy glides through intersections and sails down boulevards with a full Capitol police escort, every single crossroads blocked by police cars. We are on our way to the national ceremony at the United States Capitol Rotunda, and it won’t do for us to be late. The motorcade slows as it approaches Capitol Hill, and the three buses slowly maneuver and dock like lumbering giants at the sidewalk entrance. The pistons blast and the buses drop gently. The engines are cut. The doors open.
We have arrived. Springtime in Washington.
It is a beautiful morning, and the Capitol Police dismount from their escort motorcycles and walk over, motioning and instructing for occupants to disembark and follow the guides. Emerging slowly into the warm April sunlight are the guests of honor, many of whom step down gingerly, clutching canes or holding the arm of a relative or friendly government escort. Nearly all sport caps festooned with pins and patches. Here, now, nearly sixty-five years after the last battle was fought, the liberators of the concentration camps are returning, many for the first time since World War II ended.
One hundred twenty one old soldiers, eyes sparkling as they pose for photographs, are escorted slowly through the entryway of the grand building. A single teacher follows the veterans on this beautiful spring day. And as far as I know, I am the only high school teacher in the country this year to be invited, specifically, to be with them. I know some of them, and several of the survivors of the Holocaust here today, on a very personal basis.
Teacher Matthew Rozell, Holocaust survivor Stephen Barry, National DOR Ceremony, Washington, DC April 2010. This photo was taken the day after the 65th anniversary of Steve’s liberation in April 1945. We had just been honored by the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum before the national ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda.
You see, we are walking into the Capitol Rotunda for the annual Days of Remembrance Ceremony, commemorating those lost in the Holocaust and today especially honoring the liberators who put a stop to it. I am here because I teach the subject of history to teenagers; I am here because in my lessons and projects with students, we have been making the difference to defeat the legacy of Hitler in the classroom. And we honor what these men did as teenagers, and more. We have made our own mark and changed hundreds of lives in literally reuniting the survivors with the men who actually saved them. Six decades later.
Passing through security and now inside the Rotunda, I am amazed at its beauty but also at the intimacy that emanates from under the hallowed dome as the veterans and survivors, politicians and officials process in. Scaffolding with TV crews and narrow towers with klieg lights illuminate the area, and as the ceremony begins, I am one hundred feet from General David Petraeus, who is about to address these old soldiers. The haunting sound of the Marine Corps violinist serenades the gathering, carrying our thoughts to the victims of the Holocaust whom we remember today. The names of the liberating Army units are called out from the dais as each division is formally recognized, their unit colors hoisted aloft on cue and paraded in.
Capitol Rotunda, 2010 DOR Ceremony. Liberating Army unit flags are paraded in.
Yes I am here, amid the pomp and ceremony, to commemorate the victims, the survivors and today, these soldiers:
Me, a high school teacher who began his career hoping for a pink slip, an easy way out so that he could simply walk away from this profession.
*****
“What’s your policy on homework, Mr. Anders?”
I’m leaning over the kid’s desk, hands placed firmly on either side. In suitcoat and tie, I’m trying to make myself into an imposing presence for my first high school history class. I’d just attempted to collect a handful of written assignments from 25 non-committed sixteen year olds, and now I’m wondering in desperation how to deal with the poor showing in my very first week of public school teaching. I am the third teacher that these kids have had this year, having just started last week, two days before the Thanksgiving break.
Should I assign the group of them to detention after school? Or choose one to make an example out of him? I decide on the latter.
Lenny Anders, a tall long-haired ‘disengaged’ student with a black motorcycle jacket, lifts his head up long enough to answer coolly:
“Not to do it.”
Clunk. Lenny’s head returns to the desktop.
The class laughs, points, and hoots! Eyes roll, heads shake. Lenny does not even move in response to all the commotion-he’s still face down. And I’m left flapping in the breeze with my rookie mistake; how in the world would I make it until June? A very real question.
*
I’m 26, and I am on my own, but living back at home. A dual irony, really, as not only had I proclaimed defiantly (upon graduation from high school) to my [teacher] father that I would be leaving Hudson Falls FOR GOOD , but when queried about life after high school, I also puffed out my chest and exclaimed “I don’t know, but I certainly won’t be a teacher!” The desired effect was achieved by the angry teen; the wound was deep, and the twist of the knife distinct. I smugly went off to college, having no game plan or clue.
Okay, so what I told my father did not turn out to be the words to live by. Here I am, eight years after high school, on the other side of the desk, teaching the same subject as the old man. Living out of his garage, no less.
It’s my first few weeks back in my old high school, and I’m pushing what feels like a shopping cart through the crowded hallways, with lesson props, books, and marked-up papers to turn back, all akinder. I’m shuffling from classroom to classroom, like an itinerant peddler of obscure vials of “wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’ that nobody seems to want, and I don’t dare turn my back to the chalkboard. I have discovered that a new teacher is also a magician, and can, with this act, make pens, paperballs, and sometimes books fly and illustrate Newton’s Laws of Motion of their own accord. Maybe it’s me, but when I walk into the classroom, these students seem to rub their hands together in hormonal homicidal glee. To many of them, I am next on the hit parade, hopefully out by Christmas.
That’s power, and they have it. How I am hating these immature young savages. How they delight in torturing me.
But enough is enough. I make up my mind to do something about it. I hit on another idea. I’ll tell Johnny/Suzie in my gruffest voice, before the entire class, ‘I NEED TO SPEAK TO YOU AFTER THE LESSON‘- that should settle them all down! I’ll make an example out of one, so the kids will look at one other with a mixture of terror and relief that it was not them summoned after class! I open my mouth to commence the New Regime, but even before the bell rings, they rise noisily and obliviously to my impending reign of terror and move as a herd for the door. And the teacher-owner of the classroom comes in anyway, clanking his briefcase and fishing for his keys to unlock his closet, as he does EVERY SINGLE DAY to interrupt the end of my lesson. I give up. I have to be off to another classroom myself anyway, to begin the torture anew. And when I do drop the hammer later, I have my life threatened in front of the class by an older student. The office suggests strongly that I go to the police station to ‘swear out a complaint’.A what?
For the first time in my life I’m sitting in a police station, in the first month of my public teaching career, trying to balance in a wobbly chair with stainless steel ankle-shackles affixed to the legs, listening to the officer clack out his report on a typewriter .
This is why I became a teacher?
I feel SO alone.
Sitting on the bed, I’m chain-smoking four cigarettes in a row in the twenty minutes before school in the room off my parents’ garage before heading off to work-to a place that, you will recall, in a previous existence, I swore an oath I would never return to.
So let’s review, shall we? The position I had filled a quarter-way through the year had had thishistory. Would more blood flow? Does everyone in the school expect it to be mine? Another professional acquaintance comments, only half-jokingly I think, “We want to see if you suck and how long YOU will last.” (A feel-good fuzzy memory, looking back.)
*
In desperation, I am living day-by-day. I’m banging out lesson plans, notes, and tests nightly after dinner on the typewriter for hours at a stretch. I try calling parents, but there is no privacy at my house and surely it is a sign of weakness- after all, the old man doesn’t have to call parents.
As I struggle to survive in my first year, a tight budget year when layoffs are being presented as a distinct possibility, I secretly pray that a pink slip in my mailbox will end my misery and I will have an excuse to move on to another occupation- I have been trained in the restaurant business, after all, and people always have to eat. How I remember the anguish of a colleague in another department- I shared an “office” with her in the bowels of the building- when she got her pink slip and burst into tears and pointed at me and wailed aloud that “it should have been you, you don’t even want to be here”.. and I kept my silence, because I knew she was right. She got the slip, and I did not. I did not realize that my private anguish showed so much; I was afraid to talk to people about the troubles I faced each day in the classroom. And now I could add GUILT to the top of the heap.
What the hell am I doing here? I did not know it then, but I was DROWNING.
On schedule, the principal did his classroom observation for my official evaluation later that year, and a charitable description of the event would be ‘the great train wreck’. The ninth graders were flirting with each other, joking, and throwing stuff as I tried to bring order and conduct the lesson. At our post-observation conference, the boss leaned in and said, “You really did not have control, did you?” Eyes beginning to well, I slowly shook my head. He paused, looked me in the eye, smiled, and crumpled up the report he had written for my file and threw it in the waste can in front of me. He settled back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, and said seven words: When you are ready, let me know. A soul-crushing weight suddenly lifted. And looking back now, I see that those words had consequences.
Maybe this man saw something in me that I obviously could not see in myself. Nearly 30 years later, it’s clear to me that I was suffering from what I’ll call ‘first-year public teacher shell-shock tunnel vision’.
*
The pink slip eluded me that year, and I was too gutless to resign and end my misery. So imagine my dread as the new school year approached. I saw my roster and every shred of my being constricted and tightened. The same torturers were to be in my classes. AGAIN.
Then, a funny thing happened. The kids were a ‘summer away’ older. And they were genuinely glad to see me. I had survived, and as the year went on, we all grew together. The one thing I had going for me in the classroom was that I was a good storyteller, and I actually knew a lot about the history that I was supposed to be teaching students. I was enthusiastic, I was passionate. They started to listen. Over time, I became their class adviser, orchestrated their prom, took them on their senior trip. We survived together. They went on, some even to become teachers, and others today make many times my salary. I even had their kids in class (much better behaved, actually). We built a foundation and ventured forth on to great things.
*
Back home, in the same high school where I secretly prayed for that layoff slip years before, kids are in the auditorium tuning into the live broadcast and looking for their teacher in the gathering in the Capitol Rotunda as it is broadcast live to the nation. In Washington, after the ceremony, there is a text message from my Congressman’s aide. The Congressman would like to meet me in his office, NOW, if possible. He is well aware of my invitation to Washington-that a small town high school history project has has altered thousands of lives throughout the world.
*****
So, the Moral of the First Lesson comes to me nearly thirty years after the occurrence:
I nearly left the teaching profession. With seven simple words, my principal threw me a lifeline. Where I would be today if, all those dark days ago, someone had slapped an INEFFECTIVE label on me to fulfill a political objective (‘Too many effective teachers, here, in New York State. Baloney! Find me some ineffective teachers. PRONTO!’) But today, given the proposals in New York State and elsewhere, it’s game on for the witchhunt of the people who devote their waking hours with the youth of our nation.
What if I had been labeled a failure before I even got out of the gate? “INEFFECTIVE, Year One” would have been all the push that I would have needed to exit the classroom forever- that simple push, over the cliff.
I KNOW I would have left the profession.
Maybe I’d have more money than I do now.
But I would not have more wealth.
Because NONE of this wonderful stuff in my life, or my impact on other people’s liveswould have ever, ever happened.
Matthew Rozell teaches history at his alma mater in Hudson Falls, New York. His first book, The Twilight of Living Memory: Reflections of the World War II Generation from Hometown, USA is due out this spring. His second book, in the works, is on the power of listening, teaching, and remembering the Holocaust.
In 2008, Rozell was awarded a Museum Teacher Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for his work in Holocaust education; he has also been the subject of a documentary, “Honoring Liberation,” produced by the museum. His work has also been modeled in educational programs across the nation. In 2009, Rozell and his students were named ABC World News “Persons of the Week” by Diane Sawyer.
He rarely wrote home. He did write home to his minister about one event that evidently really caused him to stop and think. Attached is a copy of that letter that his sister transcribed – making copies for others to read. The letter describes the Farsleben train and his experience there.
Teaching History Matters 