I recently returned from speaking engagements to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. A good friend and her dedicated staff hosted my talk at the Holocaust Center for Hope and Humanity in Orlando. Liberator son Frank Towers Jr. was in attendance and even was invited to light one of the six candles in our International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony with honored survivors and guests. It was quite a meaningful day, with a lot of thought and dedication put into its planning.

The next day I was at a local high school. The kids, for the most part, were great. I held their attention for 80 minutes. Been a while since I did that.

Now, the first new thing for me in the ‘school talk circuit world’ was that the administration, through my original hosts, asked to see my presentation in advance, in the expectation of flagging any Florida defined partial ‘woke’ or triggering content that might upset the young adults I would be speaking to. (I’m speaking about the Holocaust, people. Everyone should be disturbed about it, but I bring a message of hope for humanity, too.)

Turns out they were ok with 99% of it. They didn’t care for some of the WWII soldier-slang lingo I had used in previously recorded presentations for adult audiences, but I wasn’t going to use that anyway.

SIDEBAR: In this ‘hot news cycle’, the local NPR affiliate was excited to do a telephone interview with me, I guess mainly to show support for teachers besieged with this new state legislation that is terrifying many of them in the classroom. (You can look it up, if you are not familiar. ‘Missteps’, parent complaints, can cost you your job-or worse.) I spoke to the reporter for fifteen minutes about my project, my work, but she seemed to want to get to if I would like to comment on the new legislation. In her rush she got some of my important background facts wrong, and my twenty second comment on my take on the legislation was the only focus she included in her soundbite.

Paraphrasing, I said I just wasn’t all that familiar with the laws but that I also thought I might be getting into ‘trouble’ if I was a teacher in that state. She took that comment for her agenda, so I gave my Florida Holocaust education outreach sponsors a head’s up, after the reporter sent me the link to her story; I didn’t want to embarrass their efforts to reach out to their local educators. When they asked me if I wanted to do it, they had thought the interview was supposed to be about honoring the victims of the Holocaust-instead the word of my appearance was reduced to somehow another soundbite in the culture wars of the day.

For sure, I have no problem with supporting my fellow educators. Our host liaison Stephen did a fantastic job of arranging the speaking engagement with the coordinating Advanced Placement and IB instructor. The auditorium filled with maybe 600 advanced high schoolers, aged grade 10 through 12. I think it went well; I asked a lot of questions, as many as I ‘answered’, and I got some good questions back, and ‘knuckles’, high fives from kids near the front row. The technologist and the booking teacher were impressed and just wonderfully welcoming and later profuse in their thanks. They saw it all. My education liaison Stephen was also very happy with the talk. I appeared to have reached my target audience, which after all was the students, and that felt good. I still ‘got it’, after five years away from daily student contact. And I am grateful for the opportunity to engage with them.

What didn’t feel so good, though, was the lack of response, or even overt presence, of my fellow educators and/or the administration that granted permission for the talk in the first place. There were maybe a handful of adults in the back of the auditorium, and I don’t even have any idea who they were. I didn’t notice any teachers sitting with their students. I was the one who had to gently remind the less mature kids to put the cellphones away. Not one teacher came up to meet me afterwards, to greet me or chat or offer feedback, outside of the gracious host teacher and tech guy.

Later, I mentioned that for me, this was seemingly a more-often-than-not pattern to a new acquaintance/colleague with similar school performance experience. He commented, “Without fail – absolutely 100% of the time – the teachers used the performances as a break. They never attended, not once.” I’m not saying teachers did not attend the presentation, but darned if I could pick them out.

Okay, so I didn’t write this to knock the teaching profession. I’m a champion of you, was one of you for thirty-plus years. I get the part where teachers resent having instructional time pulled, being told once again they have to attend an out of classroom happening not of their own making or choice. But come on. You’re supposed to be setting an example here. At least make the effort to sit though it with your kids. Attentive. Especially given the topic.

And what to make of no-show administrators? Since I’ve retired, with the exception of my own former school district and university, “without fail”, I can’t recall any administrator greeting my appearance with a show of ‘welcome to our school’ or taking the time to introduce me at the podium.

Not one.

What are we supposed to be teaching to our students? It’s ironic because I added this slide specifically for that target audience.

Maybe it’s my ego, or I’m overreacting, but it seems to me if you’re going to have a speaker or performer at your school to inspire young minds, maybe remember that your kids look to you to set the example. Dignify the subject and the message you vetted out of your concern with job security with the respect it deserves.

We’re all busy. But maybe just show up for the next person who takes hours out of their life to bring an important message to your kids, a warning to humanity, but also of hope. Introduce yourself. Stay for a while.

And let the kids see it.

I did a local talk last week to about 150 local veterans. I spoke about my latest book on the Pacific, the sacrifices, the fact that it was a war that many Americans did not, and do not, know much about, outside of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.

My friend Ron took out a full page ad on Veterans Day to honor his father, a World War II veteran and survivor of the Bataan Death March. It was a reprint of a 1946 local newspaper article. John is in my first book, which was also on the Pacific.

THE POST-STAR, GLENS FALLS, N.Y.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 1946
John Parsons, Local GI, Recounts Jap Tortures
Left for Year’s Hitch; Ended in Manchuria With Gen. Wainwright

By BURR PATTEN

“Just a year’s hitch in Uncle Sam’s army.”

That was the outlook March 24, 1941, when John E. Parsons, 22 Everetts Avenue, local hero, left Glens Falls with a quota of 17 draftees. But it was a far cry from just the year’s hitch. Instead, it included nearly three and one-half years as a prisoner under the Imperial Japanese Army, sharing with General Wainwright the rigors and tortures of Jap prison camps.
For Parsons it was just Army routine up until Dec. 8, 1941, when on a Sunday morning at Clark Field in the Philippines he sat on the steps of a barracks with some fellow soldiers watching an approaching flight of 56 planes which a passing officer described as a “Navy formation.” In a few minutes a thunderous crash of bombs began a nightmare of horror for Parsons which was to run from Japanese barbarism in the “Death March” through prison camps in an itinerary though Formosa, the Japanese homeland, Korea and into Manchuria.
On Christmas day in 1941 it became necessary to evacuate Clark field, and parsons, who was with the 803rd Aviation Engineers, tells of wasted energy put forth in the building of two airstrips in the retreat toward the tip of Bataan in the blind hope that American planes would someday come. Up until March the men who were building and trying to keep strip in repair in the day were doing guard duty on beach at night. By early April they were being used as infantry replacements in the line and soon went to line for full duty where they remained until the surrender.
Rations as such did not exist after the middle of February, even the Calvary horses having been eaten. A rice mill was being operated behind the lines and the food consisted almost entirely of plain boiled rice, small portions twice a day. Whole kernels of dried corn were sometimes boiled, but they were so hard as to be almost inedible. Finally malaria, dysentery and fatigue took their toll of troops running out of ammunition in the face of a foe growing stronger daily, and Bataan fell.

The “Death March”
Of the “Death March” Parsons says, “It just can’t be imagined.” The march was a distance of about 75 miles which was covered in around six days. For healthy troops that would not be exceptional, but for the sick and weak, as nearly all were, it was a cruel ordeal. It was not a continuous march, parade fashion, but rather continued over a period of about a week with groups of 500 being sent out each day. Parsons says they were forbidden to help anyone in any manner, even if he fell. To do so was to invite a rifle butt in the back. He saw three men bayoneted in the back at a rest period when they walked a few feet from their group and knelt over a puddle splashing water on their faces.
The Japanese way of feeding the prisoners, on those days when they did, was to place a bag of about 150 pounds of cooked rice at the head of the column and let them scramble for it. Those at the rear usually got nothing. More food was always promised “tomorrow.”
The termination of the march was at Camp O’Donnell where the most sadistic practices were routine. Prisoners were put in groups of ten, a policy which was in effect from then on, and in the event anyone man attempted to escape or made any move which might be construed as such, the other nine were put to death with him. When this did happen the ten condemned were made to dig their own graves the afternoon prior to their deaths. Then four stakes were driven around the pit and the man was tied hand and foot spread-eagle over the hole so he was forced to stare at his own grave all night. In the morning the entire camp was turned out to witness the executions and the condemned were offered a cigarette and a blindfold, the latter of which was usually refused.
A standing rule of the camp was that all prisoners bow to the guards. The guards would amuse themselves by hiding and jumping out unexpectedly when a prisoner came near. He would then be called to attention and slapped for not bowing. In the three years and five months that he was a prisoner Parsons does not know how many times he had been slapped or beaten but he states “30 would be a light guess.”

In a few days Parsons was transferred from Camp McDonnell to Bilibid Prison in Manila as part of a 12 man detail to work on the docks unloading ships. By this time his weight was down to 116 pounds from a normal of around 175 and his joints had begun to swell and sores were breaking out on him. After he was found too weak to carry even small cases he was he was allowed to report to American medical officers who though under close supervision, had a fairly free hand supervision at the prison. The fact that most of the prisoners there were used as laborers, explain this fairly decent treatment, Parsons reasons.
A combination of medical care and a diet supplanted by smuggled purchases from Filipinos did much toward restoring his health and he was considerably stronger when on Sept. 23 he was shipped to Formosa in a group made up largest of high ranking American, British, Australian and Dutch officers.
At Formosa, or Taiwan as the Japanese called it, he was sent to a Camp Korenko where he spent the next nine months. It was here that he met General Jonathan Wainwright and they remained in the same group until just prior to V-J Day. The Japanese wanted General Wainwright to sign a statement to the effect that they had volunteered to work for their captors. The general refused and forbid anyone else to sign such a statement. As a result the food ration was cut from a bowl of rice twice a day with an occasional bowl of seaweed soup.
It was here that their shoes were taken away from them, including General Wainwright. The fact that they refused to sign up for work did not mean that they were not worked. At this camp and Camp Shara Kowa, also on Formosa where the group spent 16 months, duties consisted of working in rice fields, growing sweet potatoes and making rope.

Before going out of work and before returning to the camp formations were held at the Americans were made to count off in Japanese, usually in groups of ten. To hesitate when it came time to see who would have charge of the groups present was more complicated and thus easier muff. In order to supplement the meager diet whenever possible, PW’s stole food. One day Parsons hid some sweet potatoes with the intention of taking them back to camp. A guard observed him and told him not to touch them. At the end of the day when he thought no one was watching him he again tried to pick them up. The same guard appeared from seemingly nowhere, and parsons today carries the scar of the bayonet wound in his right arm as a reminder of this incident.
The Japanese believed that Formosa would be invaded by our force so on Oct. 9, 1944 the group that Parsons was with was put aboard the Oyruko Maru, which was sunk in the Philippines on a later “voyage” 1600 American PWs. Only a few survived. The Oyruko Maru had considerable difficulty getting out of the Formosa harbor, in fact made three attempts but was driven back twice. Even before the first attempt, the harbor was bombed on Oct. 13, 14, and 15 by American planes with a result that it was about a week before any attempt was made to leave. When the bombing raids came the prisoners were locked in their compartment and timbers were wedged against the door, the hatches were all closed and the ventilation was shut off. One bomb struck so close that it killed 17 Jap soldiers on deck. The 286 men in the compartment had a double row of bare boards to sleep on as bunks which afforded everyone a place to lie down, though they would be shoulder to shoulder.
The first attempt to leave the harbor terminated when the Japs apparently detected a submarine the first night out and turned back laying over in the harbor for five more days. On the second attempt the PWs heard a terrific explosion which they later learned was caused by a torpedo missing the ship and exploding on the shoreline to which they were sailing parallel.
The third and successful attempt was made with an escort of two destroyers. The Japanese took a work detail on deck to wash dishes so these men kept the others in the hold informed of events. There was also a talkative interpreter from whom some information could be gained.

The ship successfully reached the seaport of Moji, on Kyushu, southernmost of the Japanese home islands. By this time the Japanese seemed to see the handwriting on the wall and treatment was generally better. At one time they were quartered for a time in a hotel where hot baths were available daily, something unheard of before.
After a comparatively short stay in the Japanese homeland they were transported to Korea where they went by rail to a camp North of Mukden in Manchuria. Later they were moved back to Mukden where they were when the war ended. The first inkling they had that the war was over was when they saw a B-29 flying low near the prison camp and saw 10 objects parachute out. Later they learned that there were four men and six bundles of supplies dropped. The four Americans were given a rough reception, according to Parsons, and thrown in the prison camp. The following day, August 16, they were liberated by the Russians who had arrived in the vicinity the previous day but because of some technicality had not liberated them.

Free At Last

Parson says that there was not a great deal of demonstrating when they at last learned that they were free. One of the first things they did was to put the japs personnel, from colonel down to guards in the stockade and soon a reversal of procedure took place.
Despite his experiences, if Parson had a burring hatred for the Japanese, he conceals it well. He shows a bitterness towards those of the enemy who participated in the “Death March” and for those responsible for one of the practices at a Formosa camp. That was when on rainy days, the camp would be called out and made to sit in a group on the wet ground facing mounted machine guns. They were told that in the event of an allied invasion 0f Formosa, this would be their fate. This took place about once a week, and having no source of news they never knew if it was the real thing or another rehearsal.
For some of his guards he has a good word. Some of them he says even stuck their necks out to help the prisoners. Oddly enough, the Jap who bayoneted him is one of these. He says, “After that, he acted as if he couldn’t do enough for me.” But, he adds, “For every good one, there were 20 that weren’t.”

Wainwright “Great Guy”
Parsons describes General Wainwright as “a great old guy.” He says that he kept up the morale of the men by talking to them. He told Parsons that he was familiar with the Glens Falls area, having at one time been a colonel at Plattsburg Barracks. Asked if the reports were true about the general having been slapped once by guards, Parsons smiles and answers, “Once?” One time the general was said to have cut his hand on a dish, at least that is what he reported when he sought medical aid. But the story got around camp that a guard had pointed a bayonet at him and the spunky general had pushed it aside with his bare hand.
General Sharp, the adjutant under General MacArthur in the Philippines who was also a prisoner, gave John a card in Formosa reading: “My thanks and regards to you Parsons- William F. Sharp, Major General.” Brigadier General Carl H. Seals wrote a letter to Parson’s mother last September from Walter Reid General Hospital reading in part, “For the past three years I have been a `prison mate’ of your son, John. We left the Philippines together on a Jap ship in September, 1942, and have been together in various prison camps ever since. Throughout prison life he has been a big help to me, doing chores that I was little able to do. In fact, he was always most kind and considerate of my wants, which I shall always appreciate.”

Parsons is the son of Mrs. Edward Parsons, 22 Everetts Avenue, is married, and lives with his wife and two children, a daughter, Gail, and a son, Royal, at that address. He held the rank of staff sergeant at the time of his discharge and is entitled to wear the American Defense Service Medal, American Service Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Medal, Distinguished Unit Badge, with two clusters, Good Conduct Medal, Philippine Liberation Medal, World War II Victory Medal. He was discharged at Fort Dix, N.J., last month after having been a patient at Rhoads General Hospital in Utica for a few weeks.

EPILOGUE

Here is more information from Mr. Parsons’ son.
3-1-2015
“The article from the Post Star’s interview of my dad is 100% true. Few of the men received purple hearts, medals for heroism, and had no medical records. It came back to haunt us years later when dad was denied VA benefits time after time.
Even if money were offered us it is a poor substitute. There was no fishing or camping with dad. My mom and I took care of him, he didn’t provide for us. He was destroyed because of it. There was no honor for him because his country abandoned him when he needed it.”

We have to do better.

Ron tracing his dad’s steps in the Philippines.

I spoke yesterday to the 30th Infantry Division Association at the invitation of Col. Wes Morrison, after a two year pandemic delay. It was wonderful to meet with the veterans, active duty soldiers, and their families and other invited guests, including a Gold Star family who just learned of their father’s association with the 30th, which, as you know, went on to save the train with their attached armored battalions.

I love the graphic above, designed for this 76th annual gathering. Yesterday they learned more about their legacy, and I’m sure it will inspire.

Some of our local news outlets have shown interest in this story. One ran today. We hope to have the film ready by Quarter 4 next year. I’ve edited a couple sentences/ photos for clarity on my part, but I think Ms. Hochsprung nailed it. Next up, Toronto in June to visit with Ariela!

After two-year delay, author Matthew Rozell visits Magdeburg, Germany

by Gretta Hochsprung, Glens Falls Post Star

May 24, 2022

HARTFORD, NEW YORK — The story started in his classroom.

History teacher Matthew Rozell and his students interviewed World War II veterans for the Hudson Falls High School World War II Living History Project he started in the 1990s.

A 2001 interview with retired U.S. Army Sgt. Carrol “Red” Walsh of Johnstown unearthed the story of the liberation of a train near Magdeburg, Germany — a story that turned into a book and an upcoming documentary film.

On April 13, 1945, near the end of World War II, Army Sgt. George Gross and Walsh were deep in the heart of Nazi Germany, part of the U.S. 30th Infantry Division and the 743rd Tank Battalion, when they spotted a train sitting on the tracks.

The train contained 2,500 Jews being taken from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, a Nazi concentration camp in the Czech Republic. The American soldiers found the train deserted on the tracks and liberated the Jewish prisoners, saving them from extermination.

Rozell shared photos of the liberation on the school’s website and eventually turned the story into his second book, “A Train Near Magdeburg — The Holocaust, the survivors, and the American soldiers who saved them.”

A dedicated Dutch-American organizer, a passionate local historian, the town’s museum coordinator, and, importantly, the local school’s world history teacher and her group of high school students near Magdeburg found Rozell’s photographs and started the “Stranded Train Committee” to raise money to build a monument to remember the day of the liberation, a subject the German students formally didn’t learn much about.

Rozell and filmmaker Mike Edwards were planning to capture the monument dedication ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation in Germany in 2020.

But the event was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, a lone red-headed high school student named Johanna Mücke placed a bouquet of flowers at the site.

Over Easter, Rozell finally made the long-awaited trip to Magdeburg, a central German city on the Elbe River, to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the liberation — two years later than expected. He brought along a film crew to conduct interviews and film the dedication ceremony.

“After that first gig got canceled, we kind of decided we didn’t need to film all the hoopla,” Rozell said, “we wanted to go and interview people. Unfortunately in the last two years, I lost like four or five survivors that we never got on film.”

Rozell and the film crew shot scenes at Bergen-Belsen, which is where Anne Frank and her sister died. There is an exhibit there based on Rozell’s book.

The place now looks like a park with mass graves, Rozell said. The British liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945.

“When the British got there on the 15th, there were 60,000 people there and a lot of them were sick and dying,” Rozell said. “Eight hundred of them died the day the British arrived. So it was a nightmare. There were close to 10,000 corpses piled up.”

Rozell walked the route taken by the American soldiers who liberated the train. He met up with now-20-year-old Johanna Mücke, who acted as their tour guide and translator and took them directly to the liberation site.

“I’d never met her before, and I’d never been to Magdeburg before, and I’d never been to the liberation site before,” Rozell said. “This is what I’ve been doing with my life for the past 20 years.”

Rozell and a cameraman hiked down a ravine to the railroad tracks where the famous liberation picture was taken in 1945. When he arrived at the tracks — still a very active train route — a train rushed by, giving Rozell chills.

Seventy-seven years to the day, on a beautiful spring day, Walsh and Gross liberated that train.

Rozell is most impressed with the German students who have asked questions and learned about a past that many Germans want to forget. Many of the students had never met a Jewish person. They hadn’t learned much about the Holocaust in school.

“Nobody knew, even though it was in their backyard, about this story,” Rozell said.

Rozell took home rocks to remember his travels. He picked up a rock at the train site.

“It’s actually a piece of that place that’s with me forever,” said Rozell, who remarked upon the details of a trip 20 years in the making.

The story has come full circle, he said, but the chapters are not yet complete.

“Just when you think it’s over, the phone rings or the email chimes and there’s a new survivor — quote unquote new — somebody who had never known the story before,” Rozell said, “and the book and the film is helping these people heal.”

Johanna Mücke and her German classmates were part of the team that formed “Stranded Train Committee” and raised money to erect a monument in memory of the liberation of the train near Magdeburg. Ron Chaulet of the Netherlands (pictured above) was instrumental in setting up the foundation.

“It’s bringing together the new generations with the ones that are leaving us,” Rozell continued. “It’s bringing together former enemies, these dedicated German historians, who now dedicate their lives to helping these Jewish families get a sense of closure. So the whole experience has been one of healing, and it’s healing for the soldiers and the families of the guys who fought in combat.”

https://poststar.com/news/local/after-two-year-delay-author-matthew-rozell-visits-magdeburg-germany/article_4c00d9f2-da9b-11ec-9cfc-f7526f2a8e77.html

On April 15, we were in Germany and visited the site of one of former medic Walter Gantz’s recurring nightmares. Walter passed about six months after Mike Edwards, the director of the upcoming film A Train Near Magdeburg, took this photo at his final interview with us in his hometown of Scranton, PA. I wrote the post shortly after; our Easter Saturday visit to the cemetery: I hope somehow there was a measure of closure for him, in talking to this German student, and for us to find her resting spot.

“I used to work a twelve-hour shift, from eight in the evening to eight in the morning. In the wee hours of the morning, this young girl died. For some reason, I wrapped her up in a blanket and I carried her down the stairs and I was crying.

We had a war tent that was used as a makeshift morgue. I placed her in there. I wonder why I would do that; I must have liked her for some reason. I didn’t have to do that, because we had a team that took care of those who died, and placed them in the morgue.

I spent seven weeks with these people. Most of us spent seven weeks, and during our so-called watch, 106 people died… God, it was tough. [This girl] was actually fifteen years old. Her name was Eva, and you might say, ‘How was it possible that he could carry her?’ She probably weighed 60 pounds, maybe. I thought about that many times, and I must have been attracted to her for some reason. That haunted me, really. It really haunted me.”

Easter Saturday was grey, cold and overcast, occasionally spitting rain. We picked up Johanna, our now-established translator, and headed to Hillersleben, to meet Daniel Keweloh and his family, to conduct interviews with Germans who were alive when the train was liberated and remembered the soldiers, the Jewish victims, and the hospital at Hillersleben where Walter Gantz and other GIs cared for them. About 150 died here in the next month, and were buried here, including a 15-year-old girl who Walter had become attached to. When she died five weeks later, he carried her body out to the morgue tent.

This greatly affected him the rest of his life.

In 2018, when she was 16, Johanna wrote to me to ask if there were any soldiers still alive. I responded with Walter’s contact information, and she reached out to him. They carried on a warm relationship by mail over the next year, just before his death; I know on a special level that this helped heal the trauma that he could not speak about for most of his life.

Daniel K. and his father Klaus-Peter took us to the now practically abandoned cemetery, surrounded by a sea of solar panels where the hospital and garrison complex had been-first German, then Soviet occupation until the end of the Cold War. No individual graves were individually marked, as they were buried in an old air raid shelter outside of the hospital.

There, with Johanna present, we found Eva’s name on the wall…

Josh films the cemetery…

DAY 4. Today, Thursday, we interviewed German students in their former school near the liberation site. They discuss the responsibility of keeping history alive, and the worldwide impact of this important story that unfolded in their literal backyard.

We arrived at the school and met Johanna, and were let in by a custodian, as the students and teachers are on their Easter spring break. I toured the school with her as the guys set up the set, set up in the former classroom of her former history teacher, Karin P. at the end of a long corridor.

Johanna was interviewed there, as were some of her former schoolmates.

Their history teacher had attended a lecture in the spring of 2018 by local Hillersleben father and son historians Daniel and Klaus-Peter Keweloh in Farsleben. If you recall, Farsleben is where the train had stopped, stranded, with the Holocaust prisoners awaiting their fate uneasily, some younger ones entering the village to look or beg for food, others going to the small lake or pond near the tracks on April 12th. After the liberation by the tanks of the 743rd Tank Battalion on the 13th, more troops of the 30th Infantry Division and the attached 95th Medical Gas Battalion arrived to evacuate the sick and emaciated people to the newly captured garrison town and hospitals at Hillersleben. The 823rd Tank Destroyer Battalion had by then also arrived to take over the town of Farsleben, where its commander had placed his service weapon to the head of the mayor of the town to quietly assure him that he expected his orders to provide for the survivors that Friday be carried out with immediate assistance of food and shelter; bakeries cooked all the night and local farmers were ordered to bring in food supplies as well.

So today we talked to theses schoolkids, and teacher, later, at her home. The English of the students ranged from quite acceptable to outstanding, they actually begin language studies quite young, with the emphasis in the fifth through 12th grade on English. Interesting, and naturally, their parents learned Russian, but you have to remember that six weeks after the Americans took this area, the terms of the Yalta Agreement kicked in, and the Soviet Red Army moved in, Soviet control lasting until the fall of the USSR in1991, and Russian occupation until 1994.

These kids spoke first without their teacher present. They all attested to her fire, her passion for history—like me, a thirty-year veteran of the classroom. Johanna especially recounted her interest in modern European and world history taking off with the introduction of things like the French Revolution, World War I and World War II in the tenth level or grade, the exact age group that I also taught it in the United States, to 15 and 16-year-olds. I felt like I was back in the classroom myself, with my own interested students. I told them that, and that their history teacher sounded a lot like me in her delivery of the material to be learned; you don’t just tell the kids to ‘open up to page 142 and read aloud’. You teach them real facts, for sure, but then you probe further into motivations, opposing perspectives and viewpoints; you ask them to delve into sections that others might dismiss or move right along over. You guide them to question their own processes, emotions, and to use newly practiced skills of reasoning, writing and detective work in their own lives. Sometimes, a teacher is presented with an opportunity to ‘do history’ in a very big way. And most of those times, this involves taking big risks, stepping out of traditional comfort zones, putting one’s self on the line, one’s ‘money where one’s mouth’ is, ‘walking the talk’. But have you ever had a fire within burning, expressed it in a special setting, and seen it jump to others? Because it will take on a life of its own, and you get to witness new ideas and concrete happenings that never existed being created before your eyes. It is the most exciting feeling, like falling in love for the first time. And it spontaneously grows almost out of your original control, but you also realize that had it not been for your passion, and later your patient nurturing, it might not have even ever existed. And that is a humbling thing to be lucky enough to realize.

So this is what I saw these students describing about their teacher. To myself, I thought that when Karin does see the competed film, with their testimony we recorded today, she will be one of the lucky ones, the teacher who can see what her passion wrought outside of the classroom, with out having it come out only 30 or 40 years later when people remember you fondly at your own funeral.

The other thing that struck me today was what the teacher felt when she learned of this story in 2018 from the historians, and saw was the photographs and soldier and survivor testimony [from this website and the Hudson Falls school one that preceded it], about what was really a lost event that linked their two small hamlets.

“How could I not know about this?”

So she put out all call for interested students to join her at a meeting after school, and a core group got involved the next fall school term. They learned of a local woman who remembered the incident, and who had one of the Greek Jews boarding at her home, where they did become close. Johanna learned that indeed, some of the local families did express compassion, kindness; others, of course, were fearful, wary of these thousand of persons now on the outside of the town. Who are they? Where did they come from?

They teamed up with the local museum to create an exhibit, and met survivors who traveled once again to the town of their liberation as children. Ron Chaulet set up a foundation in the Netherlands to collect donations for a proper, permanent memorial.

Teenagers got to meet the first Jewish persons they ever encountered. They entered this project in a history competition and won a prize. And they wanted to learn more about the Holocaust. They organized a trip to Bergen Belsen. The came face to face with the horrors inflicted upon their world by a government that existed for twelve years in their own country— one their own grandparents and great grandparents lived in.

The teacher was brave to introduce her students to this history, to go forth with this project. Some of the students got subtle pushback when reaction to their project was publicized; a fatigue of sorts by ordinary Germans being called to account for the crimes of their grandparents generation, at home and abroad.

That’s not what the project was about, though as Johanna noted in one of her recorded statements, it is about feeling responsibility for keeping the knowledge of the Holocaust, and what happened in her backyard, in the front of people’s minds. For Karin, it was about doing the right thing not only as a teacher, but as a human being. Since the publication of the liberator photographs on my website and now others, and my 2016 book, survivors have been coming here to see where their parents, and in some cases, they themselves as children, were liberated, or where parents or grandparents succumbed and were buried. How could there be nothing at the liberation site to recall, honor, and remember?