Teaching History Matters

“Never have I met such devoted human kindness. Their humanity led us back to our rightful life as human beings on earth…

Now, after so many years, let me at least say, “thank you very much” to those devoted and kind US soldiers.“

This valuable narrative surfaced a few months ago when it was sent to me by Shoshana Ben-Tora of Israel, written by her mother. Two of her brothers who were on the train are still alive, and remember this event with tears in their eyes… She sent it to me on Israel’s Independence Day. I share it on our Independence Day. Following that , you can see the letter that Chuck Kincaid wrote, as read out during our Soldier-Survivor Reunion last fall, of the sights that effected him for the rest of his life.

April 7-13, 1945

After suffering from constant starvation for six long months at the death factory of Bergen-Belsen the SS left us now in total hunger and total thirst. By now, we had been steadily crouching inside the crowded cattle trucks for five days. We were too exhausted, dizzy and weak to grasp how grave our situation was. What do the Nazis have in mind?

Turning Point – 12 April, 1945

We now reached the most crucial hour of our life during World War II under German Nazi rule. From each and every truck, a Jewish leader was asked to appear before a high-ranking SS officer, who issued a disastrous order that we immediately carried out. All men between the ages of sixteen and sixty were to line up in columns of five in front of the cattle trucks, with the angels of death fluttering around. We had to fight them off, and – luckily for us – we won! Our deteriorating health prevented us from comprehending the great life-and-death peril we were in at the time. We did not sense how we hovered between life and death, but our subconscious felt and knew it.

A paralyzing darkness seized me. Time stood still until all the men returned to the cattle cars. Then, our leader told us what really took place. As our transport of two thousand souls somehow got caught up between two combatants – the US army fighting against Hitler’s cowards – our SS captors decided to annihilate us all. They were going to gun down the men with machine guns in front of the cattle cars, and then blow up the rest of us – babies, small children, women and the elderly – in the cattle cars. That was the decree that the Nazi beast devised when its hour of doom came. Our leaders persuaded the SS officers to withdraw the decree by bribing them with gold jewelry that the Spanish Jewish group had. The SS officers fled, leaving us to be liberated shortly by the US army. Thus, by the generous decree of the Almighty, we were rid of the cruel tormenting clutches of the German Nazis, on the precious date of April 12, 1945, around mid afternoon.

This is how our “door of freedom” opened wide before us. Our leaders told us how to behave, letting us know that we could leave the cattle cars, but must stay close by. We were also told that we were in close range of an ongoing heavy battle. Those who wished to sleep the night outside the cattle car could do so on top of the grassy hill just in front of us. We were presently situated twenty kilometers from the city of Magdeburg, between two small towns. To our right was Farsleben and to our left was Csilics. At long last, the enfeebled crowd began crawling out of its prison, although many were too faint to enjoy the very first steps of freedom. It looked like there was hope that the US army would liberate us for good from the barbaric domination of Nazi Germany by the morrow.

A Real Bath!

We soon spotted a small pond and together with my sister Jolan I took my first steps in its direction in order to take a “real bath in real water”. As we walked there, a band of SS German officers were running away. One of them aimed at us with his small gun and fired some bullets with an accompanying last farewell to us – “swine Jew”! Luckily for my sister and I, we were far enough not to get hurt.

In front of the cattle car, we could see German civilians from the two nearby towns running in opposite directions on the main road, trying to escape from the approaching US forces. With dulled sense, we glimpsed towards them. Several SS guards stayed with us. Some of them asked for – and received – civilian clothes from our people.

Many of us spent the night on the grassy hill beneath the open, starry blue sky. A nearby gun battle illuminated the area through the night. Sounds of cannons kept us awake and we prayed fervently now more than ever for our liberators’ swift victory.

The next morning we dug up recently planted potatoes we found between two stones, made a fire and cooked them. They tasted delicious. In the early afternoon, I again started walking towards the small pond, but then my little sister Jolan excitedly hollered to me: “hey you, come back fast, the US army has arrived”!

US Angel Soldiers

As much as my faint condition would allow me, I hurried to the scene of the miracle to welcome them, this being the big moment we so yearned for. Two angel-like American soldiers stood there beside their “magic” jeep. My sister and I looked on enchantedly as they took captive the several SS cowards who stayed in their shameful and disgraceful uniforms. The SS henchmen held up their hands while one of the Americans stood opposite them with a pointed weapon. Then, the second US officer searched their pockets.

These two dear, brave soldiers of valor hurried straight from the battlefield to liberate us from the satanic German Nazis. I just kept looking at their faces, which still reflected emotions of battle. Their eyes and face mirrored wrath as their glance fell on us, the feeble crowd. They came to liberate us and the many cadavers laid out in front of the cattle cars on the bare earth.

The American officers told us that an airplane spotted our transport leaving Bergen-Belsen, and that they escorted and watched us since then. In the event that our Nazi transport guards would attack us, they were ready to come to our defense. It was Friday, April the thirteenth, at about three p.m., when the gracious US army emancipated us – our group of two thousand living dead. They brought us back from the edge of the grave, from the satanic, barbaric, murderous clutches of the German Nazis.

Standing there and looking up at our liberators, I waited to sense some kind of emotion on this miraculous occasion – but no. Reality did not penetrate my consciousness. My senses were incapable of experiencing any signs of emotion – no tears of joy appeared, nor even the slightest smile. My senses were left stiff, in the aftermath of extended suffering. We are liberated, but only outwardly. Our mind still remained under great pressure, as heavy, dark clouds obscured our world of comprehension. It will take a good many years to be free completely. When that time comes, if ever, we will be able to feel wholly liberated and shake off the shackles of bondage and imperceptible suffering.

Feeding Us Back to Life

Taking their German  SS captives along with them, the two American officers left us for now. The majority of our group was so feeble that they stayed inside the crowded cattle trucks. Some ventured to the nearby small towns for provisions. The following day, early in the afternoon, the US army arrived with a big army truck. They brought us a delicious hot meal, potato goulash with veal meat. Never before in my life, or after, did I eat as tasty a meal as this. I just looked on as those US soldiers of valor took care of our group of two thousand, going from cattle car to cattle car so patiently. After suffering so long from inhuman treatment, I felt a great distinction to be treated with human kindness by those American soldiers. It was like being born again.

With their kind devotion toward us they sowed back into our souls the sparks and seeds of human hopes and feelings. By Sunday morning, my sister Jolan and I plucked up some courage and crawled out of the cattle cars to look around at the nearby town of Farsleben. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that US officers were already strolling the locality, patrolling the place. Some of our fellow Jews were also around and about. The local population either locked themselves in their homes or escaped. None of them ventured to welcome the new liberators.

Suddenly we came by a friend of ours, Kati, with a smiling face. She invited us to taste from a big can of scrambled eggs that she just received from the American soldiers. Gladly, we did. With our bare hands, we grabbed a handful from it, thanking her for the kindheartedness.

Our Liberators

Now about our generous, kind, angelic liberators who freed us from Nazi hands. As I look back over the long years that passed, and recall the group of 2,000 of which I was a part – how we must have looked when we were freed from Bergen-Belsen! I must say that the soldiers who freed us were like angels from heaven. They took care of us with great devotion. They worked hard with their fine kindness that saved our lives. They placed us in the nicest looking houses in the area to make us comfortable. They prepared the special meals we needed because of our weak and sick condition. In short, the US army pulled us back to life from the edge of the grave. They did all they could to build up our spirit and health so damaged by the Nazis. Never have I met such devoted human kindness. Their humanity led us back to our rightful life as human beings on earth.

The US army freed us on the thirteenth of April 1945. When they left us we were all sorry that they hadn’t given us a chance to thank them for all their kindness. Now, after so many years, let me at least say, “thank you very much” to those devoted and kind US soldiers. Within 24 hours they put up a hospital for our sick! They put us up in comfortable quarters and went from room to room looking for the sick and infirm. If they found someone in bed or looking too pale-faced, they immediately carried them to the hospital. There they conducted their efficient check-ups. Many of us were sick with spotted-typhus, a very infectious disease. Two of the American doctors who treated us contracted it and sadly enough died from it.

April 17^th. (1945)

Dear Chaplain;-

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. (transcribed by Kaylee Merlow, HFHS ’11.)

So this orphaned little girl who was liberated on the train came to visit me in the USA, all the way from Israel.  My wife and I met her and Lynda, her friend from NYC, after they drove up from New York this week. When she came down to the lobby of the hotel, she just glowed. We had dinner at a beautiful place on the lake, and the next day a cruise on a ship on the lake, and then at my friend Johnny’s restaurant in Saratoga Springs, after they got a special tour of the Dance Museum in Saratoga from Sarah, Johnny’s daughter. Later in her tour, she traveled to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where the staff were not only prepared for her  testimony appointment, her interviewer Ina also told her the date of her birth-June 15th- which she has never even known before! She was cooking dinner for her family in Israel in March, when the phone rang and she learned of this website and of this new chapter in her history, thanks to Varda W.

Hello, Matthew,

My name is Lily Cohen and I was a little girl who was on that train coming from Bergen-Belsen.  My name was Lili Kazimierski-Shein and I was an orphan, probably about 5 or 6 years old.  at that time.  I don’t know my birth day, or year.

I am so moved to find this research, as most of my early life appeared to be “erased” somehow by the Holocaust, and only now am I able to take small steps into what was my past to piece together fragments of memories.  I remember the train.  I remember the hill, I remember a German soldier running away, and I remember a woman who was trying to take care of me dying at my side.

How did I hear of you?  Varda  called me last evening, having found my name in a book by Hilda Huppert called “Hand In Hand With Tommy.”  Since it only mentioned my first name and the kibbutz where I was raised, she called the kibbutz!  Amazing how things can come together when there are people dedicated to finding out “the rest of the story.” Thank you for your dedication.

My life has turned into a really wonderful victory over Hitler’s attempt to obliterate the Jewish race.  Tonight I made dinner for 10 people in my home in Tel Aviv – 6 of whom came from me… You are really doing a holy work and I do hope to meet you some day.

TESTIMONY FOR LILY BY NIUTA Haya GUTKOVSKI 28 MARCH 1997

Matt Rozell, Lily Cohen, Lake George, NY June 24, 2010.

The first time I met her, Lily was approximately at the age of 2 or 3 in Bergen-Belsen.  I was told that she was there with her mother who died in the camp from Tuberculosis.  Lily was there with a “father on paper”.  His name was Schon, received at the time a Certificate for himself, his wife and daughter, for Palestine. His wife and daughter were killed, and he remained on his own with the papers.  Instead he listed Lily and her mother on his papers.  They arrived to Bergen-Belsen as a family.  As I heard, the Kazimierski family was very, very rich, and Lily’s mother, Madame Kazimierski paid him for the Certificate.  When her mother died, Lily remained with him in the men’s barrack, which was separated from the women’s barrack, but there was a connection between the two barracks and the two camps.  It was a special camp which was called ‘The Palestinians,’ because all the people had some kind of connection to Palestine.  I had a husband in Palestine.  We heard from the men in the barrack that Schon was abusing the girl, hit her, and ate her food (we only got only 200 grams of bread per day).  She was dirty, neglected and very, very miserable.  We had decided, Serve Celevachik who was the head of the Men’s camp of 350 people, and me, who was head of the women’s barrack of 70 people and children that we had to take the girl out of the men’s barrack.  At the end we decided that he would take all the things that her mother gave him, which was probably some jewelry and gave him food, our rations, and we wanted him to give the girl to us, for our care.  We got her in a horrible condition, dirty, neglected, full of lice, in very, very bad mental condition, with unstoppable crying and fears.  She did all her things in the bed.  In our barracks, Bronka Eiseman started to take care of her in a very devoted way.  She used to get up in the middle of the night for her, she managed to release some of the fears, she shaved her head, she took care of her, and practically ‘put her on her feet’ in a very limited way. And then another disaster happened to Lily.  The second one.  Bronka was sent to Vittel, which was a camp in France, and Lily stayed again without any shelter.  We tried to do the best we could.  We took turns to take care of her.  I loved her very much and made a contact with her which actually lasted until this very day. Then, in 1945, the Germans decided to transfer us to Theresienstadt.  That is what they told us.  We walked on foot more than 10 kilometers.  Lily, at that time, was probably 4 ½ years old.  We were 2,500 people, Germans, Dutch, Polish, etc.  Then they put us on the train. We were thinking this is the end of our troubles.  We were on the train, stopping and starting for probably one week.  On the way the train was bombed.  And Lily, who at that time was under the care of one of the women, again, stayed alone, because the woman was killed.  On the 13^th of April, 1945, finally the train stopped, the Germans ran away and the Americans came.  They took us to a German city that belonged to SS families by the name of Hilleslaben.   There, for the first time, we got food as we needed.  I was there only a few weeks and then I ran away. When I arrived to Israel, to Palestine I heard that Lily came on a children’s transport and ended up at Ma’ale Hachamisha near Jerusalem.  When I heard about it I started to visit her regularly, and that is how we stayed in touch all these years.

And I am very happy to have been a small part in their liberation in April of 1945 and now we have come full circle and we have met again.  We have embraced, we have hugged, we have kissed, we have cried.  And we are very proud to be a part of their lives today.

~Frank Towers, liberator, describes his feeling to the people he saved 65 years earlier, and to student witnesses at Hudson Falls High School.

“I could teach World War II [including the Holocaust]  in 15 minutes if I was just going to teach to the test,” Mr. Rozell said. “One multiple choice question, and zip — they’re off to college.” Newspaper interview, 11-11-2001

D-Day, Sixty-Five Years On. a post from last year.

a must read on this day and the days to follow:

ANTHONY LEONE- INVASION OF NORMANDY

This interview was conducted in 2001 before a student audience with a veteran of the Normandy invasions. It originally appeared on my other website, www.hfcsd.org/ww2.

He sits behind a student desk, wearing a medal presented to him by the French government that he also wears to Mass every Sunday. “I wear it to pay homage to the guys. I made it and they didn’t. It still bothers me.”

He rests on his walking cane and leans forward as he speaks. He is animated-he motions with his hands to emphasize his points. A prolific author and letter writer to the local daily newspaper, Anthony’s mission is to educate the public about what his generation of Americans went through.He doesn’t hold back in his interview. This is how he deals with it, every day…

…I hate snakes, I could feel the snake slithering between my legs. They were firing live ammo over our heads and I said “hey (whistles) you know,” but I endured and they didn’t bother me, the snakes, and I didn’t raise my head, so I’m here to tell you about what happened after that.

 

I got assigned to USS LST 27.  I said to myself what the heck is a LST. We boarded in Norfolk VA.  I carried my sea bag, along with the rest of the graduates of boot camp, up this long gangway. This was the biggest vessel I had ever seen in my life. If you had it up here on Lake George, it was 327 feet long, imagine that, and 50 foot wide. That’s a big ship.

Matthew Rozell – What does LST stand for?

Anthony Leone – Landing Ship, Tanks.

MR – Landing Ship, Tanks. So what was that  supposed to be for in the  Normandy landings?

AL – What we did is carry small boats. We sent the small boats in first loaded with troops and vital supplies……

MR – Then you turned around and went back?

AL – No. When we were able to, we came in with the LSTs and opened the bow doors and dropped the ramps. But at the time, not even the small boats could get in among the obstacles, there were mines all over the place. They were killing our soldiers, like sheep to the slaughter…

We left Norfolk in March of 1944, and landed in Africa. We had gone through bad air raids by the Germans in the Mediterranean and U-boat attacks and we survived. One ship was hit and set afire, a ship carrying lumber, and incidentally the crews couldn’t get the fire out, it was in the stern of our convoy.  I almost lost my life there, I didn’t tell you this previously, I was the loader on a 20mm AA gun…

MR – What is an AA gun?

AL – Anti-Aircraft Gun, it was a 20mm… it’s obsolete now, but then it was a pretty good gun, it was pretty accurate, made in Sweden. I was about to get another magazine and load, when a bomb landed on the port side, near miss, and it swung our LST over to the starboard. I was going into the dark Mediterranean with a magazine in my hand and I said  “There goes Leone, you’re done.” The aimer grabbed me by the back of my  life-jacket and pulled me back. That was close, that was my first “baptism by fire” right there. I was 18 years old, screaming, hysterical, shaking a fist and if a real German had popped up in front of me on the deck, I would have fainted dead away. I was scared-heroes are heroes, but most are scared.

MR – So that was the airplane attack.

AL – Yes, that was the Luftwaffe, JU-88’s and Dornier torpedo bombers. We succeeded in almost completely obliterating the British anti-aircraft cruiser on our port side. I think some of the guys did it deliberately, some guys didn’t like the British too much.  They knocked the radar off, that’s a story I don’t wish to go into.

We sailed from Africa and reached Africa, with out further incident. We sailed for England. We landed in Swancea, Wales. We got liberty. And we un-loaded an LCT. An LCT is a long wide flat box sort of landing craft where the ramp drops down and the conning tower is in the back and we had one top side. We carried it piggyback. What we did was fill the starboard bilge tanks with water and then chop the cables holding the LCT on, on these greased wooden skits. Severing the cables and the thing would slam into the water with a big splash. We got rid of that thing, there were some heavy seas and we were top heavy. We had no keels to speak of.

MR –  Now is that what would land the men, later on?

AL – Yes, the same ones, matter of fact, that went in there…….. from there we went to Southampton and then Falmouth.  From there we became part of the ‘B’ back up force for the D-Day landings, at the end of May.  We took on units from the 175th Infantry, which belonged to the 29^th Division.  Everything was frozen, we couldn’t move…..

MR – Now this is about what date?

AL – This was about the end of May, about a week before D-Day.

MR – So you’re getting ready for the Great invasion.

AL – Yes, we were sealed off, the area was sealed off, we couldn’t go on liberty, we couldn’t visit the British girls, which was quite a sacrifice in those days, they were all over the Yanks.  We were like the invention of sliced bread, they couldn’t get enough of the Yanks.  The Yanks had a lot of money I guess, and they showed the British service men up pretty bad.  Their behavior was abominable….

MR – Whose behavior?

AL – The American troops over there.  The British treated them real good, the Americans were spoiled had a lot of money, and….it’s the same  old story.

They sealed us off, and on the 4^th and 5^th we were ready to go. We headed toward Piccadilly Circus, that was the name of the circle in the middle of the channel that we were supposed rendezvous at, from there the flotillas would go towards the English beachhead and we would go towards the American beachhead, Omaha and Utah beach.

MR – So you all went out to the sea on the 5^th…

AL – Yes-it was real stormy.

They called it off and Eisenhower was really blown away by it. They waited, and I guess a British meteorologist saw a break, a window in the weather. Eisenhower had decided to go for it, he had his fingers crossed, he had a letter ready apologizing for the loss of lives and withdraw from the continent in case it failed.  So, we went, the first units moved up from British ports of Southampton, London, Plymouth and Portland. We were the second, the backup force from Falmouth.

By the time we got to the beachhead the next day, it was a mess. This was on June 7^th. All you saw was a layer of white smoke on the beach. The Americans had gotten off the beach by late June 6^th.

The [US Army] Rangers had gotten in behind the Germans, but we were there, it was still hot, there were still mines all over the place, hedgehogs and stakes driven in the ground with mines sitting on them.  At high tide when you came in you couldn’t see them.  Our LCVPs had to negotiate between them, this was impossible at high tide, you had to wait until the tide was way out, then the soldiers had to walk almost half a mile over bare land, no foliage or anything.

Of course the Germans mowed them down like a wheat field.

,As I said before there were German privates just sitting there with machine guns, just killing Americans and crying as they were doing it “Please go back I don’t want to kill no more” (Repeats this line in German). At one point General Bradley was going to pull them off, take all the people at Omaha Beach and bring them over to Utah. Utah was a pretty successful landing-there, casualties were almost negligible. We came in with the LSTs. We had already launched our LCVPs and brought in supplies and troops.

MR – What’s a ‘LCVP’?

AL – Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel, that is, a Higgins Boat. It was invented by Higgins, a boat builder from the United States. Then it was time for us to come in and unload the tanks.

As we came in, it was pretty hard to negotiate because the mined obstacles were still all over the place and there were pieces of human bodies floating all over.  The American soldiers had the life belts on that you activate and they blow up, they had a CO2 cartridge. What it did was, they had a heavy pack on, and it would up end them and drown them, they couldn’t get loose. We saw a lot of soldiers floating that way. Their life belts worked alright, but it killed them. Their bodies floated to and fro all day long.

We came in and we were moving in. Now up in our conning tower our officers had barricaded themselves behind a pile of mattresses up in the bridge, not that they were “chicken”, they were just being smart about the whole thing, they didn’t want to get hit with shrapnel. We proceeded in.

On Utah Beach on June 19, a big storm stirred up a lot of mines. Now our lookout yelled “Wreckage in the water, dead ahead!” We stopped. Apparently there was an LCT had been hit earlier and it was laying there. Had we gone another 25-30 feet we would have been impaled, practically stuck on the thing-we couldn’t move. We kind of backed up and motioned for the LST in line behind us  to go around. When they did, they went around us, and as they made that move they blew right in half; a mine.

A huge structure like an LST, 327 feet long, welded steel, 50 foot wide, blowing in two. Now the crew aboard it had a motley assortment of pets. They had pigeons, and chickens. What the hell would you have a chicken onboard for?… Chickens and dogs and cats. This was strictly forbidden, but they let them get away with it. We were the “Suicide Navy “, they called us. A very apropos title.

We proceeded to go in after we saw that. We were not too enthusiastic about going in and hitting the beach we said, “If this is happening here, what is going to happen there?..” Even though it was a day later, June 8th,  we started to move in on to Omaha Beach. We were all armed to the teeth.  We had our clothing well impregnated with chemicals to withstand a gas attack, and when your body got out of it, that stuff would drive you crazy. We had that on and we were all ready to go over, life jackets and helmets, I was manning a 20mm and we went, all of a sudden the PA crackled. I heard the damnedest noise, that scared me more than the enemy, really, when it first came on, (singing) “Mares eat oats and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy, a kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you” (stops singing). It was the voice of our skipper, he was dead drunk. (audience laughs)  He was a very solemn looking individual, dark, we couldn’t see him and we called him “The Shadow” at night. When he walked on the bridge all you would see was the glow of his cigarette. He let it burn to his lips and then spit it out, he was fearless. Here is this guy who is fearless and he is singing “Mares eat oats”, I would have chosen a different tune really, but everyone burst out laughing , it was a morale builder in a sense. It told us the captain was human after all and he was just as much afraid as we were.

So we went in and hit the beach, started up the ventilator fans as we had big tubes coming out of the tank deck to suck the exhaust fumes out (and incidentally both their vehicles were burning oil, don’t know why, poor maintenance). They got them going and the trucks were towing (this was the 175^th Heavy Tank Company, it was part of the 29^th Division) and they started to move out when the brake seized on the 57mm anti-tank cannon carriage they were towing  in the back of the lead truck.  Marion Burroughs, a friend of mine, who was driving it says now,, “God that saved my life, that brake locking up like that, it never happened before in all my years of working with it”… That’s the way things happen you know. He motioned the other truck to go back  around him- it was an army wrecker, used for picking up tanks or wrecked vehicles. It went around and both of the vehicles went out, two I think it was,  and hit a mine just coming  off the ramp.  I still think they went off the tape. They had it taped off where it was safe you know, there were mined and un-mined areas. It blew up and there were bodies all over the place and the trucks were filled with Chesterfield cigarettes and Old Gold, I remember vividly, and Lucky Strike had gone gold, they had taken the green out of the cigarette wrapper to save the cadmium that was green, I think. Cigarettes went all over the place, dummy bazooka shells, the thing was loaded with ammo and gasoline and it went up, a flaming cauldron-  it was like a blast furnace. These poor guys were screaming and they were pinned to the frame and you could see the rubber of the tires all turning to liquid and dripping. Their screams! It seemed like they screamed long after life left their bodies. I still hear them sometimes. If you ever hear a person screaming in agony when they were being burnt…

We went out to see what we could do. I reached down and got a piece of shrapnel through the top of my helmet, cut it open and broke some skin. I didn’t realize it until the thing fell of my head landed on the deck. I went down  to see what I could do to help. You couldn’t get near the thing the fire and the flames were so hot. A couple of individuals did go out and they rescued somebody, and I went out to get another helmet.  I need the another helmet in the worst way. They were all over the place like coconuts. I see one of them, and I went out to get it and zing zing zing!!!!!! The sand, burst of sand right in front of it, some Germans probably anticipated my move and said “well this guy’s not going to get his helmet”.

One of our officers, a deck officer, a little fellow named Surf, went out and dragged somebody back to the ship.  They always made fun of him because of his size, he was puny, he was like another Don Knotts, they all used to pick on him, make him stand on a table because he was Jewish, things like that, that was World War II.  A colored steward would have to stand on the back of the bus, even though he survived a lot of battles, he had to stand on the back of the bus in Norfolk.  This is what World War II was like.

He went out in the surf -he was crazy  and so forth, he got back and I think he got the Silver Star for it. He was ten foot tall in our eyes after that.

There was one medic, he’s a friend of mine now, he was a medic at the time and he belonged to the Foxy 29 medical team. They were a medical team assigned to all the landing ships, like the LSTs, and they were composed of one or two naval doctors and a team of corpsmen.   We had a surgical operating station in the back of the tank section, it was a complete operating room and we operated on the wounded there.  At times we’d go back to eat and we’d set our trays down in the dinning room. They’d operate on the tables there, and our trays would slide in the blood and stick to them.  Talk about appetizing, well you don’t feel much like eating after that.

To get back to the burning trucks, finally someone closed the damn bow door.  So, we lifted the ramp, it takes ages for that thing to come up on chains, we closed the bow. We waited for the fires to subside and the flames went down, and we went out. We hated to see what was still out there. Things were still hot, fires were still burning, everything was gone -it was just bones sitting there grinning skeletons.

We started out low, the fellows of the 175^th took off with the trucks and the anti-tank guns. They didn’t cast one eye towards the human barbecue, I call it, that’s what it was. They looked the other way, unbeknownst to them they were heading into a bad battle with the Germans at St. Lo. The [German] 352^nd Infantry Division wasn’t supposed to be there, but it was and it hit them.

On June 7th,  we started carrying wounded back, became sort of a hospital ship, because we made many many trips back and forth across the channel. Our tank deck had stretchers, metal things that clipped in and you hung bars and stretchers on. We had a lot of wounded. Among the wounded, we had enemy and our own troops together. We didn’t differentiate when it came to surgery, they were treated the same believe it or not, this is the way the American mentality worked. The Germans probably weren’t that way at the time, but we treated everybody the same. One German boy, couldn’t have been more than 13 or 14, had his arm blown off up to here (points to above the elbow). I was out feeding the prisoners and I came to him and I had a can of creamed chicken, where you heat up the can, I proceeded to take a spoon full and put it in his mouth.  He took it in his mouth and spit it all over me. He was a Nazi, Hitler Youth, only 12 or 13, I think.  About that time I was about to take the .45 out and kill him, I felt like doing it, really.  The fellow next to him, a German prisoner, was my age and my God he looked twice as old and his hair was gray.  He had apparently been through an awful lot.  He was a member of the 352^nd Infantry Division out there.  They had been through bombing from the air, they couldn’t come out in daylight -our planes would hit them with rockets, knock out their tanks, and their tanks would have to move by night, couldn’t move during the day.  The German Tiger tanks were notorious for bearings failure, they were awful heavy, even though one lone Tiger tank could knock out ten of our Shermans.  Our Shermans were junk really.

The older fellow, 18 years old, same age as me, looked old enough to be my father at the time. He said “You must forgive him, he lost his parents in Berlin, the American air attacks killed his parents, and his entire regiment was wiped out, he is alone.  Your mortar got him” [makes a crazy lunatic gesture and whistles] that’s the universal sign. Sometimes I worry about him, wonder what happened, he was an enemy.  At the time we hated the Germans, we had the Nazis aboard that slaughtered our GI’s at Malmedy, during at the Battle of the Bulge.  They were under double guard because the crew was all trying to get at them, and kill them .  In fact one of the crew had relatives in the army who were prisoners of the Germans. Real bad feelings.

MR – They don’t know that story, these kids. How many Americans were killed? They surrendered and the Nazi SS killed them. You transported these people back ?

AL – We transported them back to England for trial, boy you want to see them, they were different, they were not typical German prisoners.  They were arrogant.  They were selected for height, blue eyes, blonde hair, and they looked down on us. Yes, the SS, they were bad news. They had the death head symbol, the symbol of a skeleton on their caps.  All night long we had double watch on them.  There were guards, MPs, and guards with machine guns.  The crew was trying to get to them, all night long. I couldn’t sleep, I’ll tell you right now.  I mean a stray bullet, who wants to sleep with something like that going on.

We carried a lot of wounded back and forth.  One of the first casualties we had aboard, was off of the Coast Guard’s LST 16, he was the coxswain of a LCVP, bringing in the soldiers.  They hit a mine, blew both his legs off.  They brought him on our LST and put him on the operating table, he died probably an hour later, he didn’t have a chance.  They brought in a Navy officer, his LCVP got blown sky high.  He didn’t have a scratch on him. That’s what we got all day long. We got British paratroopers, English flyers, American flyers, casualties.  Before we hit the beach they were coming on board.  They were bringing them out to us on Rhinos.  Rhinos were like a pontoon with an outboard motor on it.  They put them on that and they brought them out on LCVPs too.

A lot of the time we couldn’t sleep at all.  All we could hear were the groans of the wounded, the screams of the dying and pain, and the gurgling of the dead.  You noticed that most of all. They have that vacant look in their eyes like they left this world and gone.  I guess the only thing about that is you don’t have the pain anymore.  I was 18 years old, I shouldn’t be there.  It was hell of a waste… quality time, no way.  But I wouldn’t have it any other way because as I pointed out before, Mr. Rozell has a copy of Stud Turkel’s book The Good War and it was a “good” war.  We had our fleet sunk at Pearl Harbor.  What would you do if somebody was coming in your house, grabbing your family?  You have to fight.  It was a good war, we were fighting for a cause.  I fought against my own relatives in Italy.  We had Italian prisoners on board that worked in our galley.  They helped the cook, they saw the ovens on board and went crazy.  They were the enemy and they ran loose.  The Italians were running around, the Germans didn’t like that.  Italians were big lovers not fighters- I know from experience.

We had the dead on the fantail, and I think of the most horrible thing that happened to me, next to the trucks blowing up.  I was on the bow watch, usually the bow watch had good eyes, specially trained for aircraft identification.  I got a call on the intercom from over the phones, that said the guys wanted to see me on the fantail.  “The guy from your home town wants to talk to you…”

Well before we went in and hit the beach, I talked to a second Louie from my home town. He said, “If something ever happens to me, go see my parents.”  I said, “You’re going to be all right, don’t worry about it.”  I got that call and went back and he said, “He’s back on the fantail.”  So, I went back on the fantail, it’s the stern.  It was just starting to get dark and Joe Morganson said, “There’s your dead friend from Utica right there.”  He propped the dead lieutenant up I had talked to and reassured days before. This was the mentality of the time, the sickness.  These guys were sick to do something like that.  They propped him up, pulled the blanket back.  His face was bloodied where the sniper hit him in the head.  It’s the same second lieutenant, his mother and father owned a clothing store in Utica, Kessler, his name was.  About that time I went nuts. I went after those guys, they were running and laughing, it was a joke to them.  This was the kind of mentality contend with.  When you live with people like that it’s not a good time, and you sleep with people like that, and they come back drunk, bragging about their victory with the girls.  I think their brains were where the sun don’t shine.  A lot of violence, one guy went crazy.  We were anchored up in Rouen after D-Day, to bring troops up there.  A guy had been drinking an apple cider made locally in Normandy,  it was very potent drink.  It’d really knock you out if you weren’t used to it.  He had his gut full of it.  I laid there and watched him. I didn’t trust that son of a gun.  All of a sudden his eyes turned red, he was crazy.  He came at me with his knife.  He was slashing at me, jumping on me.  Why me? I don’t know.  He get this left foot right open, right through the shoe. I’ve got a big scar there.  It took about 20 of us to get him down.  You know he got out of the punishment? He tried to kill me, but they probably needed men desperately. I would have shot him, you know, really, because he tried to kill me, pure and simple.  That is what you had to live with everyday. The wounded, the dying, the death, it became a way of life.  That’s bad, that’s bad.  When I got discharged from the service I got a 100 percent disability, I was a basket case.  I had to get some shock treatment, once or twice.  It wiped out my memory.  I have written several books based on my diaries. If I didn’t have my diaries I would never recall the things that had happened.  I have in my possession the declassified deck logs of the ship.  Minute by minute the things that happened.  Some of these officers didn’t have the time to mark everything down, believe me.

The other fellows sent me their diaries. Of course they got a complementary copy of my latest book, because they gave me a part of their lives.  I spent ten years in the VA hospital in out-patient treatment, I’m still going there in Albany.  I would do it all over again, because it was a cause.  A cause celebre, you might say. It’s nothing like what’s going on today.

War itself should be abolished, it should be outlawed.  There can’t conceivably be any winners, no one would want to nuke his world.  It was bad enough to see men die all the time, it’s not a pleasant sight.  I hate to see, right now today, a dog die.  If a dog got hit by a car, I’d die, I’d feel badly.  But to see a human being die and then get used to it and endure yourself and say, this is a way of life, I have to live with it.  That crew became my family for two years, the only home I had…

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

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

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

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

Of the sixteen million American men and women who served in WWII, a half million died on the field of conflict. In 2009, over 1000 veterans of World War II quietly slip away every day. The national memory of the war that did more than any other event in the last century to shape the history of the American nation is dying with them. Incredibly, it comes as a shock to many Americans today that the “Battle of the Bulge” didn’t originate as a weight-loss term.

In the high school where I teach, I have been inviting veterans to my classroom to share their experiences with our students. As their numbers dwindled, I smartened up, bought a camera, and began to record their stories. We’ve spoken at length with a pilot forced to bail out at 28,000 feet of his flaming B-17 bomber, only to watch crew members die in the subsequent explosion and then be taken prisoner himself. We have had conversations with POWs who survived forced marches in brutal weather, and with Jewish infantrymen who were among the first to liberate the death camp at Dachau. We have met men who were handcuffed to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and who were assigned to suicide watch guard shifts there after fighting their way across Germany. We listen to what it was like to sail eerily into Pearl Harbor 36 hours after the Japanese attack and see no lights except the USS Arizona still blazing with the bodies of hundreds of Americans entombed in it. We are with the torpedo bomber pilot as he takes off from the flight deck of the carrier USS Yorktown during the epic battle of Midway, and is forced to land on the deck of another carrier as the Yorktown burns and later slides to the bottom of the sea. A blind Marine describes what it was like to lose his eyesight nearly sixty years after being struck by mortar fragments, not once, but twice in the same day at Okinawa (and he told us that ” the hardest part was telling my mother”). We ride with the tank commander fighting across Nazi Germany for mind-numbing eighteen hour days, a self-described “fugitive from the law of averages”, as his tank crests a hill to a sudden encounter with a train transport of emaciated and suffering Jewish concentration camp victims. A former 17 year old from our town tells us what it was like to share a shell crater for a sleepless night with a headless fellow Marine in the  black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima. My students and I are just “one person away” from the shock of Pearl Harbor, the chaos at Omaha Beach and the Huertgen Forest, the horrors of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Peleliu Island.

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

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

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

They’re not here anymore.                                                                                  This Memorial Day,

Remember.

Clarence was my father’s older cousin. He was twenty years old. If you click on the group photograph, he is the tall one in the center with the cross that someone drew over his head. In the first photo, my daughter Mary is at his grave in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Fort Edward, NY, this past weekend. We were decorating graves with my high school students.

Dad remembered Clarence coming home on leave and teasing him in a playful manner- Dad was just a kid. But so was Clarence. He was a gunner in a B-17 crew. He didn’t come back. None of the crew in the photograph did.

They were all killed on July 29, 1944.

POSTSCRIPT: Or so I thought for years. Read about how I found his tailgunner here. 

click to enlarge.