My brother and I were working on a story that we thought would be fun to turn into a screenplay. Of course, every story needs a plot, tension, storyline, and above all a focus. And the cool thing about this story is that it was all TRUE.

World War II infantry veteran Carrol Walsh, top,meets Holocaust survivors at a reunion in New York State, on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009. Walsh’s unit liberated a Nazi train carrying 2,500 Jewish prisoners, some pictured here, from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany during the war’s waning days.The reunion came about because of efforts of high school history teacher Matthew Rozell.

While there are several protagonists, we settled on a hero, a main character of sorts to follow.  My brother asked me why he was my hero.

My reply: because he so did not wish to be called one.

He was uncomfortable with the limelight-you could tell that with some of the interviews he did. There was always something higher behind how he conducted himself. Like his lifelong friend Dr. George Gross, the appearance of the Holocaust survivors that they liberated on April 13th 1945, I think profoundly enriched his sunset years. Above all I remember his laugh, his chuckling disdain for fools and his engaging talks to young people about what he saw-and what our responsibility as human beings is.

The last time I was with him we spent 5 hours together on a rainy summer afternoon, ten years nearly to the day after our initial meeting and my seemingly innocuous interview with him. This day he was happy as we sat together. He reminded me that he felt sorry for me as a Yankees fan, then said, do you know I saw Babe Ruth play? With his dad, he would travel to New York City by train on Sunday afternoons to watch his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers play,  back in the days when men dressed up for these outings.He popped in a cassette tape that he made-Benny Goodman, I think, closed his eyes and tapped his foot and snapped his fingers to the beat, head bowed,swaying from side to side… “Oh, man”…

My brother said to me- so do you like your main character?

No, I replied.  I loved him.

Carrol passed away yesterday, Dec. 17th, 2012, at 6:05 pm at home with his wife of 68 years by his side. He was 91.

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A Train Near Magdeburg

A Teacher’s Journey into the Holocaust, and the Reuniting of the Survivors and Liberators, 70 years on

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In the wake of so much heart breaking tragedy and misery in the world, I am pausing and remembering the actions and life of a single man who would bring to thousands of people so much joy, laughter, and of course life itself, with so much personal humility.

He profoundly altered the course of my own life in the short time I was honored to know him.  This CBS News short sums up a lot about the man. And the interview that follows was where I took today’s post title from.

Carrol Walsh: World War II Veteran Who Liberated Nazi Train Dies At Age 91

Just listen to him tell a story.

The Story with Dick Gordon- broadcast May 25, 2009

Steve Barry, Holocaust survivor

Carrol Walsh, US Army, liberator

Interviewed by Dick Gordon

May 2009

From David McCullough. I’ve heard him speak, and I am re-reading “Truman” right now. He needs to be heard again. While in no way comparing my efforts to his, we obviously are on the same wavelength, and like him, I have the same mission. I really think that more people need to “get it”.

I’m proud to say that I recently received one of the the same medals as he was awarded in 2003.

Our Failure, Our Duty
We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate. And it’s not their fault. There have been innumerable studies, and there’s no denying it. I’ve experienced it myself again and again. I had a young woman come up to me after a talk one morning at the University of Missouri to tell me that she was glad she came to hear me speak, and I said I was pleased she had shown up. She said, “Yes, I’m very pleased, because until now I never understood that all of the 13 colonies – the original 13 colonies – were on the east coast.” Now you hear that and you think: What in the world have we done? How could this young lady, this wonderful young American, become a student at a fine university and not know that? I taught a seminar at Dartmouth of seniors majoring in history, honor students, 25 of them. The first morning we sat down and I said, “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” Not one. There was a long silence and finally one young man asked, “Did he have, maybe, something to do with the Marshall Plan?” And I said yes, he certainly did, and that’s a good place to begin talking about George Marshall.

We have to do several things. First of all we have to get across the idea that we have to know who we were if we’re to know who we are and where we’re headed. This is essential. We have to value what our forebears – and not just in the 18th century, but our own parents and grandparents – did for us, or we’re not going to take it very seriously, and it can slip away. If you don’t care about it – if you’ve inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don’t know that it’s worth a fortune, you don’t even know that it’s a great work of art and you’re not interested in it – you’re going to lose it.

We have to do a far better job of teaching our teachers. We have too many teachers who are graduating with degrees in education. They go to schools of education or they major in education, and they graduate knowing something called education, but they don’t know a subject. They’re assigned to teach botany or English literature or history, and of course they can’t perform as they should. Knowing a subject is important because you want to know what you’re talking about when you’re teaching. But beyond that, you can’t love what you don’t know. And the great teachers – the teachers who influence you, who change your lives – almost always, I’m sure, are the teachers that love what they are teaching. It is that wonderful teacher who says “Come over here and look in this microscope, you’re really going to get a kick out of this.”

There was a wonderful professor of child psychology at the University of Pittsburgh named Margaret McFarland who was so wise that I wish her teachings and her ideas and her themes were much better known. She said that attitudes aren’t taught, they’re caught. If the teacher has an attitude of enthusiasm for the subject, the student catches that whether the student is in second grade or is in graduate school. She said that if you show them what you love, they’ll get it and they’ll want to get it. Also if the teachers know what they are teaching, they are much less dependent on textbooks. And I don’t know when the last time you picked up a textbook in American history might have been. And there are, to be sure, some very good ones still in print. But most of them, it appears to me, have been published in order to kill any interest that anyone might have in history. I think that students would be better served by cutting out all the pages, clipping up all the page numbers, mixing them all up and then asking students to put the pages back together in the right order. The textbooks are dreary, they’re done by committee, they’re often hilariously politically correct and they’re not doing any good. Students should not have to read anything that we, you and I, wouldn’t want to read ourselves. And there are wonderful books, past and present. There is literature in history. Let’s begin with Longfellow, for example. Let’s begin with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, for example. These are literature. They can read that too.

History isn’t just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it’s going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should be taught for pleasure: The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about.

And we need not leave the whole job of teaching history to the teachers. If I could have you come away from what I have to say tonight remembering one thing, it would be this: The teaching of history, the emphasis on the importance of history, the enjoyment of history, should begin at home. We who are parents or grandparents should be taking our children to historic sights. We should be talking about those books in biography or history that we have particularly enjoyed, or that character or those characters in history that have meant something to us. We should be talking about what it was like when we were growing up in the olden days. Children, particularly little children, love this. And in my view, the real focus should be at the grade school level. We all know that those little guys can learn languages so fast it takes your breath away. They can learn anything so fast it takes your breath away. And the other very important truth is that they want to learn. They can be taught to dissect a cow’s eye. They can be taught anything. And there’s no secret to teaching history or to making history interesting. Barbara Tuchman said it in two words, “Tell stories.” That’s what history is: a story. And what’s a story? E.M. Forster gave a wonderful definition to it: If I say to you the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I say the king died and the queen died of grief, that’s a story. That’s human. That calls for empathy on the part of the teller of the story and of the reader or listener to the story. And we ought to be growing, encouraging, developing historians who have heart and empathy to put students in that place of those people before us who were just as human, just as real – and maybe in some ways more real than we are. We’ve got to teach history and nurture history and encourage history because it’s an antidote to the hubris of the present – the idea that everything we have and everything we do and everything we think is the ultimate, the best.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-4_18_05_DM.html