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“We often wonder, was it all worthwhile?”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 14, 2014|

Matthew Rozell, 30th Infantry Veterans of WWII, Holocaust survivors at Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum, March 2, 2012.

Matthew Rozell, 30th Infantry Veterans of WWII, Holocaust survivors at Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum, March 2, 2012.

Have you ever been to a reunion of folks who have been annually meeting one another, every year, for nearly 70 years?

Where the main participants had their youths forged in the steel of battle, and come together annually to remind themselves of what it was all about?

I have been honored and privileged to attend six such reunions with the veterans of the 30th Infantry Division of World War II.

To sit with these men, and their wives and family members and hear their stories, and chuckle as they josh with each other, or to shed a tear at the memorial service for the ones who were lost, is an incredible experience.

What has made it even more profound, over the last few years, has been the inclusion of the Holocaust survivors that they saved, and their extended families who would not be here today, if not for their efforts, at these gatherings. And add a Medal of Honor recipient, one of the few surviving from World War II, for good measure.

Worthwhile? I had a 94 year old veteran grab me by the arm a couple years back, and he said to me, after listening to me and the survivors of the Holocaust speak, “Now I know what I fought for.”

This year, the reunion is unfolding as I write this in Savannah, Georgia, with the gracious hosts Carol Thompson and Jack Sullivan and his wife Stella, the children of one of the soldiers who served in the 118th Artillery.  Unfortunately I am snowed in up north, digging out under 18 inches. I’ve included my greetings to the gathering below as they meet on the 69th anniversary of the end of World War II. Next year is the 70th and I really hope that they meet again and that I can be there. As the letter indicates, they helped to send me to Europe this summer as well. Here is a PDF of what I saw.

Matthew Rozell

February 14, 2014

AND HERE IS MY REUNION GREETINGS MESSAGE AND PICS

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A higher calling.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 25, 2013| 1 Comment »

Great article and congrats to the lovely ladies, the promise of the future…. And regardless about how some may feel about teachers, or why they enter the field, I’ll stand by my words, below. My school, the State University of New York at Geneseo, contacted me for the closing comments. An honor.

And a calling.

Author James Patterson Creates Scholarship Program at SUNY Geneseo to Promote Literacy

Patterson Scholarship

Author James Patterson sent autographed copies of his latest children’s novel, “Treasure Hunters,” to the eight SUNY Geneseo students awarded James Patterson Teacher Education Scholarships this year, pictured here with the dean of the Ella Cline Shear School of Education. Front row (l to r): Marissa Liberati; Jessica Stoneham; Melissa Bellonte; and Kelsey Horan. Back row (l to r): Hannah Pettengill; Kristen Bondi; Dean Anjoo Sikka; Haley Hilgenberg; and Ashley Hark.

GENESEO, N.Y. – Best-selling author James Patterson has created a scholarship program at SUNY Geneseo’s Ella Cline Shear School of Education to support aspiring teachers in promoting the importance of literacy in education.

This year, eight graduate students earning a master’s degree in literacy received a $6,000 James Patterson Teacher Education Scholarship. Next year, the Patterson Family Foundation will award the scholarships to full-time incoming freshmen intending to seek teacher certification, with the possibility of renewal through graduation.

“I’ve been looking to bring these scholarships to more schools, and after studying a number of institutions and programs, I found Geneseo to be a great addition,” said Patterson, a highly popular mystery writer who also has written books for young readers. “My passion is to get more and more kids excited about reading, and training the next generation of great teachers is essential to that mission.”

All of the Geneseo scholarship recipients this year are from New York: Melissa Bellonte (Avon); Kristen Bondi (Dansville); Ashley Hark (Dalton); Hayley Hilgenberg (Falconer); Kelsey Horan (Endicott); Marissa Liberati (Manchester); Hannah Pettengill (Bloomfield); and Jessica Stoneham (Corfu). Hark, Hilgenberg, Horan, Liberati and Stoneham received their undergraduate degrees at Geneseo.

Patterson sent each scholarship recipient an autographed copy of his latest children’s novel, “Treasure Hunters,” and included a personalized note, stating that he was “thrilled that future teachers like you will help instill a lifelong love of reading in children.”

“We are very honored that James Patterson has included Geneseo in his literacy initiative,” said Anjoo Sikka, dean of the School of Education. “Exciting kids about books and reading is crucial to their success as readers, thinkers and keen observers and, ultimately, to become self-actualized and effective participants in our society. The scholarships will help us attract talented students with the kind of passion that drives Mr. Patterson. I sincerely commend him for his vision and am grateful for his contribution to the preparation of literacy teachers at SUNY Geneseo.”

Geneseo’s Patterson Scholarship recipients were selected on the basis of academic performance and an essay describing how they would apply what they have learned to help children develop a lifelong passion for reading. Applications were reviewed by a committee of faculty led by Susan Salmon, assistant professor and coordinator of graduate programs in the School of Education.

“Reading comes first,” said Liberati, who excelled both in and out of the classroom during her undergraduate years as a Geneseo student-athlete. “It is the compass by which we explore and map all other literacies – digital or not – and only by reading can we and our students become and continue to be lifelong learners.”

Liberati earned All-American honors in cross country and track and field. She also was on the NCAA Division III All-Academic Team in cross country in both 2009 and 2010.

“This scholarship is so much more than money to help me pay for my education,” said Hilgenberg, who completed her student teaching in Ghana, West Africa. “It shows that someone is rewarding my hard work and believing in my potential. It’s one of the greatest acts of kindness.”

Other recipients expressed similar sentiments about the power such scholarships have as a catalyst for success.

“As a future educator, I believe that it is not only my job to teach students how to read and write; it is my responsibility to teach them to love to read and write,” said Pettengill. “By opening a book, you can go on an adventure. Those small letters on the page take you to places you’ve never been and give you experiences you’ve never had.”

Patterson is among the most successful authors in history. He is the first to achieve 10 million ebook sales and has had more books ranked first on The New York Times best-seller list than any other author. He also is the current best-selling author in the young-adult and middle-grade categories and promotes reading through his website ReadKiddoRead.com.

SUNY Geneseo is firmly rooted in education, opening in 1871 as the Geneseo Normal and Training School. In 1948, the Geneseo Normal and Training School became a part of the State University of New York. The teachers colleges of SUNY became Colleges of Arts and Sciences in 1962, and two years later, Geneseo’s four-year degree programs in arts and sciences were implemented. SUNY Geneseo’s Department of Education was reorganized as a School of Education in 1992.

The School of Education today has 25 full-time and five part-time faculty members, who are preparing more than 700 students to be teachers. The school offers undergraduate programs leading to initial teacher certification in Early Childhood and Childhood, Childhood, Childhood with Special Education, and Adolescence Education. Graduate programs that could lead to professional certification are offered in Early Childhood and Childhood, Multicultural Childhood Education, Literacy (B-12) and Adolescence Education.

Among the school’s numerous success stories are the accomplishments of Geneseo alumnus Matthew A. Rozell, who teaches history at Hudson Falls (N.Y.) High School. He earned his master’s degree in education from Geneseo in 1988 after receiving a bachelor’s degree in history from the college. The Geneseo Alumni Association named Rozell Educator of the Year for 2013.

Rozell’s alumni educator award from Geneseo is among several honors he has earned during his career, including the prestigious National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution Mary S. Lockwood Medal for Education. The medal honors outstanding achievement through service and leadership in promoting education outside the formal educational process. He also has been recognized as a leader in World War II and Holocaust history through several projects he initiated that have received national attention.

“Entering the teaching profession in many ways is to answer a higher calling,” said Rozell. “The Patterson Teacher Education Scholarships increase the options for our best and brightest to enter the field of teaching and represent a commitment to continuing to produce the caliber of teachers that Geneseo is renowned for. There is no higher mission.”

http://www.geneseo.edu/news_events/patterson-scholarship

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Books.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 23, 2013| 1 Comment »

My son, brother, and I were up at our camp retreat in the Adirondacks, begun by our dad 36 years ago.  Just six miles away is one of the most famous forts in colonial America. After breakfast, for fun, we thought we might see if it was possible to re-visit the fort, having heard that a few things had changed since our last time there.

the books.

the books.

Sure enough, there was now a new entryway, complete with an admission booth. I pulled the truck up to it, and inquired whether we might proceed to the bookstore, which had always stocked a fair amount of titles, where one could peruse the stock, before deciding whether today would be the day to pay the full admission to check on any updates in the exhibits inside.

Not today. Not anymore. No  money up front, no visit to the bookstore.

Having served on an authentic historical site as a board member, I understand the desperate need to raise funds, but I did not have the $52.50 in my pocket that morning. We had not planned to spend the entire day there.

As the nice woman shrugged and turned us away, my brother said, “you should have told them who you are”.

Ha. He was having fun with me, and joking, of course. But it kind of brought forth  a sense of wonderment about my experiences this summer the authentic historical sites I visited all over the world.

I thought some about it. The bookstore that I had wanted to visit this morning stocked titles that featured my work as a history teacher and avocational archaeologist. I’m actually written about in some of the books.

I remembered I had a similar experience at our first major stop on the Holocaust Resistance  tour in Europe a few weeks back. As twenty five educators toured the site, all of my colleagues chose to give up part of their lunch hour for a private introduction by a key staff member who took the time to explain my role in helping that museum/memorial site create a special exhibition on the evacuation transports that left that concentration camp in April 1945.  As we boarded the bus at the end of the day, someone opened the Bergen Belsen official guidebook they had purchased in the bookstore (which in my excitement I had overlooked)- and there was the Benjamin photo, and summary of my work.

Later in the tour at another authentic site, concentration camp Ravensbruck in Germany, after an intense day I spied a different title and pulled it off the shelf, and showed it to another colleague. It’s the story of a survivor that I know, and this book probably would not have been written had it not been for the efforts that I had made in my teaching career.

The following week in Poland, the same thing happened to me with another title. I was able to open the book and point to my name in the credits and acknowledgments, and show where my work made a significant impact for the author and his thesis.
Pretentious bragging? I really, really hope not.   In fact I wrote this post weeks ago, not at all anxious to share, but as I process what has happened this summer, I figure stunned realization is more like it .

To visit authentic historical sites, some halfway around the world where I have never been before, and see the impact of this passion on others, is something both profound and humbling. I feel it has been transformative at some base level, yet I have not even completed my own book yet (it just keeps changing in my head- and believe me, it is up there). So it goes up to be added to the archive of happenings that occasionally knock me on the head.

In the end, getting turned away from the bookstore didn’t matter at all, except maybe to kindle a flame… though it is always a thrill to hold the book in your hands, and thumb to the page with your name on it.

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Bottles.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 8, 2013|

Matthew Rozell rediscovers and rekindles interest in sutler site, 1996.

Matthew Rozell rediscovers and rekindles interest in sutler site, 1996.

Today I am going to get a special phone call from an archaeologist whom I have known and worked for for thirty years. David wants me to be present for the removal of three intact 18th century olive green glass spirits bottles from a French and Indian War sutling house, or trading post, just outside of the British fort on the banks of the Hudson River near Rogers Island. Two intact bayonets were discovered here earlier in the week, but more exciting for us is the fact that we now think that we have found the elusive 4th wall of this building, which burned to the ground a few years into its existence. We have been searching for it for twelve summers.

Excavations began here in 2001, with me and digger Johnny Kosek and Mark Van Valkenburg. I had stumbled upon it during a pensive walk in the woods near our fort excavations in the summer of 1996. I had found a looters’ hole in the ground, spadefuls of earth littered with fragments of the very same bottle glass fragments from the period. On the ground I spied what looked like a shiny silver dime partially covered by the sand. A heavy rain had uncovered what the looters had wanted- a Spanish silver coin from 1748. Remember Hawkeye of the Last of the Mohicans? He would have drawn a dram or two here.

Period map showing location of sutler's complex. Island just to west of river.

Period map showing location of sutler’s complex. Island just to west of river.

My association with this important ground, so fundamental to the formation of our nation, began in 7th or 8th grade. Four of us would ride our banana seat bikes down to Rogers Island one summer in the early 1970s, sneaking smokes, getting away from our parents and siblings, and just dig holes in the ground with our moms’ gardening tools. I recall digging a hole as deep as my arm would allow, a tunnel straight down, a criminal activity in the eyes of any competent archeologist. Thankfully, we never found anything.

A dozen years later, in 1986, I would return as a volunteer crew member on an archaeological dig searching for General Gates’ American headquarters at the Saratoga National Battlefield Park. Here I would encounter David for the first time. I remember him asking me, after my first two weeks as a newbie, if I would ever consider going into anthropology/archaeology as a career. I think I was flattered, but I had just wrapped up my undergraduate work and was sending resumes out for teaching.

I followed him though, in 1991, to return to this Island. I had gotten hired at my high school alma mater 3 miles up the river and now had the opportunity to professionally learn what secrets the Island held. In 1992, David felt confident enough in my abilities to give me the reigns of the search for the elusive smallpox hospital at the southern end of the Island. We found it after three years of digging in the summer of 1994. 800 people died here. It was the only smallpox hospital from this era ever discovered in North America. I began to write.

hero discovers ft edIn 1995 and 1996 we professionally dug at the site of Fort Edward, no easy feat considering that today twelve houses are built upon it. At one point we were excavating a bastion (corner) in the basement of a house! We opened up a pit in a front lawn, properly protected and barricaded, but the paper boy still managed to stumble into it. I found the West Curtain wall with Johns F and K, Mark, Brad and Susan and Hans. And one hot summer day took a stroll down the riverbank to stumble upon the sutlers house.

From 1997 to 2000 I worked at the parade ground of Fort William Henry, the one where the final siege takes place in Coopers Last of the Mohicans. We found the charred remains of the East and West barracks, the exact footprint of the original fort.

In 2001 we returned to the sutlers’ complex just south of Fort Edward. I directed the digs here for many many summers,

Our high school kids learning how to think, placing the artifacts at hand in the context of a major world war that was partially fought in their own backyard.

Our high school kids learning how to think, placing the artifacts at hand in the context of a major world war that was partially fought in their own backyard.

and later returned with high school students to teach them how to professionally draft a research question, study primary source maps, diaries and other documents, and begin to look for clues, and only then to dig properly, mapping all  the artifacts and features as they emerge. They learned how to dig, yes, but more, they learned how to think.

Egyptian Archaeologists visit the sutlers site, 2009. My baby. They were impressed. Proud daddy.

Egyptian Archaeologists visit the sutlers site, 2009. My baby. They were impressed.

Lots of times when everyone would leave I would just sit at the sit alone  for an hour or so. Just sit in the stillness and wonderment of this place. Just something I have always felt a need to do. It’s like the place has some kind of power over me. It’s my baby. When we are digging, we are touching objects that have been lost for over two hundred sixty years. I am the first to touch this bayonet, this coin, this tobacco pipe, this bottle since it was last handled. Thus the anticipation of touching these three intact, upright bottles.

My house building activities have kept the project at arm’s length, but the excitement is still there and rekindled. If you want to learn more, there are several books out by David Starbuck. I’m in this one quite a bit. After today, I joked to him yesterday, he may have to update it.

POSTSCRIPT: I was given the honor of extracting the three bottles. We also found three additional ones behind them. The Egyptian archaeologists would have been proud- my personal King Tut’s tomb moment. The bottles were all complete, two thirds of them totally intact.

The Bottles. Unbroken. Filled? King Tut's tomb moment. "The tension mounts..."

The Bottles. Unbroken. Filled? King Tut’s tomb moment. “The tension mounts…”

My son Ned and I, 2002, the sutler's site, Fort Edward.

My son Ned and I, 2002, the sutler’s site, Fort Edward.

Son Ned and I at the sutler's site. Thursday morning, August 8, 2013

Son Ned and I at the sutler’s site. Thursday morning, August 8, 2013

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“Give me a hug; you saved my life.”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 11, 2013|

World War II infantry veteran Carrol Walsh, top, hugs Holocaust survivor Paul Arato at a reunion in Queensbury, N.Y., on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009. Walsh’s unit liberated a Nazi train carrying 2,500 Jewish prisoners, including Arato, from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany during the war’s waning days. (AP Photo/Tim Roske)

I am reposting this today to honor both of the men below. Paul Arato passed away this week in Toronto, Canada and his memorial service is today. Carrol Walsh, his liberator, died in Dec. at his home in Florida and his memorial service was last Friday in New York.

Paul and Rona would also check in annually for dinner with the Walsh family when they passed through our town. The last time I saw both of them together was in 2011 at one of these dinners in a local restaurant. They sat together and laughed and joked like old pals. Paul told the story of how he arrived in Detroit after the war as an eager late teen anxious to find work designing fast cars in the automobile industry and was driven to the bridge in Canada by law enforcement and pointed to the bridge to Canada, as he did not have the proper documentation. Picturing the scene in his mind, Carrol would laughed outloud and slapped his knee. Both men were so happy to have found each other.

Rest on, friends.

Holocaust Survivors Reunite With US Veterans

NY high school reunites Holocaust survivors liberated from Nazi death train by US soldiers

By CHRIS CAROLA

The Associated Press

HUDSON FALLS, N.Y.

The Holocaust survivor was 6 on that spring day in 1945 when he last saw the U.S. Army soldiers outside Magdeburg, Germany.

Paul Arato was among 2,500 starving and sickly Jewish prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, their train abandoned by its crew and Nazi guards as Allied forces advanced. Two U.S. Army tanks on a scouting patrol — one of them commanded by Carrol Walsh, then 24 — came upon the stopped boxcars.

Arato, now 71, and Walsh, 88, met again this week.

“Please give me a hug. You saved my life,” Arato told Walsh in an emotional reunion of concentration camp survivors and some of the veterans of the 30th Infantry Division who liberated them.

Arato, an industrial designer from Toronto, and Walsh, a retired state Supreme Court judge from Hudson Falls, came together for a Hudson Falls High School history symposium inspired by history teacher Matthew Rozell’s original World War II project in 2007.

“You were all kids on that train,” Walsh told the survivors, most of them in their early 70s, as they and their families greeted the veteran. “I was an old man. I was 24 years old!”

Those arriving early for Wednesday’s opening session gathered Tuesday night for an impromptu reunion before having dinner surrounded by the faux Adirondack decor of the nearly deserted indoor water park. Four of the five Nazi train survivors at the dinner had never met Walsh.

Walsh’s tank patrol discovered the desperate Bergen-Belsen survivors on April 13 — hundreds of emaciated Jewish prisoners who had been herded aboard one of three trains leaving the camp a week earlier to keep them from being liberated by advancing Allied forces.

Walsh’s patrol stayed for a time, handing out candy to some of the children, then moved on after reporting their discovery. Frank Towers, a 27-year-old first lieutenant in the 30th Division, led a convoy that took the newly liberated prisoners to a German town where they were given food and shelter.

For weeks, the men of the 30th had heard of Nazi atrocities against Jews and dismissed the stories as propaganda, Towers said. That all changed when they encountered the train.

“Then we believed,” said Towers, 93, of Brooker, Fla.

This week’s reunion is the fourth since 2007, when Walsh was joined by three of the train survivors at Hudson Falls High. History teacher Rozell’s World War II project included an Internet posting of Walsh’s account of the train liberation.

An Associated Press report of that first reunion prompted more survivors to come forward, some from as far away as Israel, Rozell said. In all, he has confirmed that more than 60 survivors are still living and has been in contact with about two dozen of them.

Nine survivors of the Nazi death train are participating in this symposium, along with Walsh, Towers and four other veterans of the 30th who fought in Germany. Rozell said this week’s gathering is likely to be the last such event of its scope, given the advanced ages of the veterans and survivors.

For Arato, Tuesday night’s reunion with Walsh brought back a flood of memories. He recalled getting candy from one of the soldiers and a handgun to play with.

“I remember it was a Tootsie Roll,” he said. “The gun wasn’t loaded.”

Arato fretted over one detail. He recalled seeing a Jeep along with the American tanks, but fellow survivor Fred Spiegel of Howell, N.J., didn’t remember seeing a third vehicle. Later, Walsh said his patrol consisted of two tanks — and a Jeep.

“There WAS a Jeep,” Arato said, a smile breaking out on his face. “I remembered it right.”

———

On the Net:

Hudson Falls High School World War II Living History Project: http://www.hfcsd.org/ww2

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wires/2009/09/23/holocaust-survivors-reuni_0_ws_296673.html

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3781062,00.html

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The Sixth of June.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 6, 2013| 29 Comments »

American Cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach, the primary landing zone for Americans during the D-Day invasion June 6, 1944. (U.S. Air Force Photo)Today one of my former students emailed me to visit saying that she had a surprise for me. She brought me a present- sand from the beach at Omaha in Normandy.

This was originally posted four Junes ago, I re-post here now.

I came into school today, on a Saturday, to start packing up my room for a move to another room.

But it is the 6th of June.

Instead I am getting nothing done, mesmerized by the scenes, live from Normandy, of the 65th anniversary celebration.

The President is there and so are 250 American veterans of the battle for Normandy,  including one of my good  friends, Buster Simmons, of the 30th Infantry Division. The Greatest Generations Foundation sponsored his visit with 9 other vets and college kids. Now I’m looking for him in the sea of faces.

My son Ned and I watched him last night as a “Person of the Week” on ABC World News in a story I contributed to. If you view the clip, you can see the photograph I provided ABC with, taken by Major Clarence Benjamin, of the liberation of the train. This is the photo that Buster uses when he speaks to high school classes to tell this story.

I am hopeful that we can get Buster to come to our high school for the  liberator-survivor reunion in September.

It was twenty five years ago, on this anniversary, that I wrote an essay in the local newspaper expressing my appreciation for the veterans of World War II. And as I begin to sort through and pack up 20+ years of memories in this room, three things are becoming clear: 1) my love for these men and women and what they did only increases as time passes; 2) the rest of my career will be focused on the promotion of narrative history in the classroom, linking students, veterans and survivors together; and 3) I won’t be getting any packing done this day.

Take a minute to watch Buster in the clip and take his optimism about the future of our nation to heart. Especially if -“you’re an American.”

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You think about why you have a three-day weekend.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 25, 2013|

By OMAR RICARDO AQUIJE- Glens Falls Post Star

HUDSON FALLS —Fred Spiegel was asked if he felt resentment toward the Nazis.

“Yes, to the Nazis, but not the Germans,” Spiegel said.

The question came from a student at Hudson Falls High School, at which Spiegel was invited Friday to discuss his life during the Holocaust.

On April 13, 1945, a train traveled across Germany, carrying 2,500 Jews en route to a concentration camp.

Spiegel was among them. He was 13.

Holocaust survivor Fred Spiegel sells and autographs copies of his book, "Once the Acacias Bloomed," for students at Hudson Falls High School on Friday, May 24. Spiegel, who was liberated by U.S. troops as a young boy during World War II, spoke about his experiences and answered students' questions. (Jason McKibben -

Holocaust survivor Fred Spiegel sells and autographs copies of his book, “Once the Acacias Bloomed,” for students at Hudson Falls High School on Friday, May 24. Spiegel, who was liberated by U.S. troops as a young boy during World War II, spoke about his experiences and answered students’ questions. (Jason McKibben –

Spiegel, 81, visits schools to talk about how he survived. He brings copies of his book, “Once The Acacias Bloomed,” which explains his life as a Nazi prisoner.

Most of the schools he visits are in New Jersey, where he lives. The farthest he travels is Hudson Falls, a school he visited a few times in recent years, a school he included in his book because it was here an important moment in his life occurred.

“They invited me,” Spiegel said of his reason for returning to Hudson Falls. “How can I say no?”

During Friday’s presentation, Spiegel often said he was lucky to be alive.

Other trains carrying Jewish prisoners made it to their destination. His did not.

His train suddenly stopped near Magdeburg. Spiegel said the train’s engineer and Nazi soldiers fled for fear of capture. U.S. troops was cutting across Germany.

Then, a few U.S. soldiers on tanks found the train and freed the captives. The soldiers included Carroll Walsh, of the 743rd Tank Battalion.

Spiegel was later reunited with his family. It was 65 years later when the unexpected happened: He was invited to Hudson Falls to meet others who were prisoners on the train.

He also got to meet some of the liberators, including Walsh, who was living in Hudson Falls at the time.

Matt Rozell, a Hudson Falls history teacher, organized the reunion. He met Walsh in 2001. He interviewed the former soldier, and learned about the train near Magdeburg.

Walsh died in December. He was 91 and a former state judge.

Spiegel, a native of Germany, said people have shown more interest in the Holocaust over the years.

During Friday’s visit to Hudson Falls, he spoke to about 30 sophomores. Some of them had copies of Spiegel’s book. Others bought the book after the presentation.

Armand Ryther, a student, approached Spiegel to shake his hand.

“I find it very interesting that he could survive what he did,” Ryther said.

Ryther said he read Spiegel’s book.

Jamie Hughes, a fellow sophomore, said it was interesting to hear about Spiegel’s experiences.

“I think it’s really amazing that he would want to share his experiences with everybody,” she said.

Tara Sano, a Hudson Falls history teacher, said the event was planned near Memorial Day so students can reflect on the efforts of veterans.

“My hope is that when you are taking your three-day weekend, you think about why you have a three-day weekend,” she told students at the start of the presentation.

http://poststar.com/news/local/article_00a9219c-c648-11e2-ae69-001a4bcf887a.html

See Fred meet his liberator for the first time.

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“I grew up and spent all my years being angry. This meant I don’t have to be angry anymore.”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 11, 2013|

Two Toronto Holocaust survivors meet their liberators 65 years later
Two survivors of a death train out of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp finally link up with American soldiers who freed them in 1945.

A WWII-era booklet still possessed by Leslie Meisels documents his liberation as a young boy from a train destined for a death camp. Meisels, who eventually ended in Toronto, met a few of the surviving soldiers who freed him and 2,500 prisoners on the train.

A WWII-era booklet still possessed by Leslie Meisels documents his liberation as a young boy from a train destined for a death camp. Meisels, who eventually ended in Toronto, met a few of the surviving soldiers who freed him and 2,500 prisoners on the train.

By: Catherine Porter, Columnist, Toronto Star, Published on Fri May 10 2013

Leslie Meisels is 86.

Leslie Meisels turned 68 last month.

Every April, since he was 18, Meisels has celebrated his rebirth. Sixty-eight years ago he was on the cusp of death, packed into a cattle car in a freight train with some 2,500 other skeletal Jewish prisoners. He weighed only 75 pounds.

Then a miracle. That train, which had set off from a concentration camp, was liberated by 12 shocked American soldiers in two tanks and an army jeep near Farsleben, Germany.

Up until then, the American GIs had assumed the gruesome stories they had heard about German death camps were just Allied propaganda devised to make them fight harder. But as they unlocked the boxcar doors, they witnessed humanity’s true capacity for evil.

They called it the death train. For Meisels, it was a train of life.

This past week marked the 68th anniversary of V-E Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe. It’s a good moment to tell the story of that train from Bergen-Belsen.

I heard about it last month in an email from a history teacher in upstate New York. He put me in touch with Meisels and Paul Arato: two Holocaust survivors from Hungary who in 1956 escaped their homeland, by then under Communist rule, and settled in North York.

Their stories are remarkably parallel. They grew up in nearby towns in eastern Hungary, they were both imprisoned by the Nazis in 1944, and they were sent first to Austrian farms as slave labourers and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.

Have you ever seen the horrifying Holocaust photos of dead, naked bodies being pushed by a bulldozer into open pits? That was Bergen-Belsen. Some 70,000 people were murdered there, including Anne Frank. They weren’t killed in gas chambers, like at Auschwitz. Instead the Nazis used starvation, sadism and disease here.

Meisels remembers mostly the hunger. They were given only watery turnip soup and a piece of bread each day. In four months, he lost 100 pounds.

Arato, just 6 then, remembers the rattling cold and twice-daily roll calls that often lasted hours. He and his older brother Oscar had to hold their mother upright, she was so weak from typhus. One day a boy in their line smiled because it was his birthday. As his “present,” an SS guard shot him dead. It was Oscar’s birthday the next day.

The horror is ungraspable.

By April 1945, the Nazis were retreating as both the Allied and Soviet armies advanced. One morning, both Meisels and Arato were awakened by guards and told to march. “We dragged our bodies over five kilometres,” says Meisels, “back to the train.”

Trains in Nazi Germany usually led to death. This one was no different. It was destined for another concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, but the guards also had orders to execute passengers. Meisels remembers one afternoon when all males 12 and older were ordered out of the packed boxcars and lined up in front of machine guns. They stood there two hours before being herded back into the putrid cars.

Over six days, the train progressed only 135 kilometres.

Arato remembers peering through between the wooden boxcar slats and seeing the SS guards drop their weapons and start running. Then he glimpsed a tank with a star on it.

The door slid open shortly and they were greeted by stunned American soldiers.

“It was hard for us to believe what we were actually seeing,” says one of those soldiers, Frank Towers, on the phone from Brooker, Fla. “We weren’t prepared for it. We were there to fight a war. We weren’t humanitarians. We didn’t know what to do.”

Says Meisels: “We cried, ‘Oh God, we are going to be free. We are going to be human beings again.’ ”

Towers, who was serving in the 30th Infantry Division, spent a day those taken off the train to convalescence homes and a hospital nearby before he had to push on with his battalion.

Meisels and Arato spent five months recovering in Germany before they could finally return to Hungary to search for the rest of their families. Eleven years later, they escaped Hungary and started their lives for a second time: getting married, building careers, having children, then grandchildren. Decades went by.

Then, a few years ago, their paths crossed at a business meeting. Arato, since retired, was an industrial designer. Meisels ran a family company making plastic moulds. At the end of the meeting, the topic of the Holocaust was raised. They discovered, to their shock, they had both been on that train from Bergen-Belsen.

Around the same time, that high school history teacher in New York named Matt Rozell stumbled upon the story.

To bring Second World War history alive, he’d instructed his Grade 10 students to interview their grandparents about the war. One summer, he visited one of his students’ grandfather: Carrol Walsh, a veteran turned New York State Supreme Court judge.

“After two hours, when the interview was ending, his daughter elbowed him and told him to tell me about the train,” Rozell says.

He learned Walsh had been in one of those tanks that chased away the SS soldiers and liberated the train.

Rozell posted the story on his website, Teaching History Matters, and a few years later a survivor from that train contacted him from Australia. Since then, 240 more have been located.

In 2007, Rozell hosted his first symposium on the train, bringing together survivors and liberators. Arato’s son came across a story about the reunion on the Internet by chance.

Arato told Meisels about it, and two years later they both traveled down to Hudson Falls, N.Y., for the second symposium. There they met Walsh and Towers.

That moment was a second liberation for Arato, now 74.

“A blanket was pulled from me,” he says. “I was always very lonesome. I didn’t share my stories with anybody. I grew up and spent all my years being angry. This meant I don’t have to be angry anymore.”

His wife, Rona, has just published a book about his story called The Last Train: A Holocaust Story.

Meisels visits schools around Toronto to speak about the Holocaust every week.

His message? “Hatred is something we have to fight against. When you hear a derogatory comment, say out loud that it is not right. When you are silent, you are not neutral. You are supporting the oppressor.”

He and Towers went to Washington, D.C. last month to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Holocaust Museum there. Towers, now 96, is the last living U.S. veteran who liberated that train. Walsh died last December.

“We hugged,” Meisels says. “Whenever we are together, I am so overwhelmed by gratitude and joy.”

Truth can be more horrifying and wonderful than fiction. Every life is precious.

CLICK HERE FOR THE STORY OF ANOTHER TORONTO RESIDENT WHO FOUND HERSELF IN THE 1945 PHOTOGRAPHS

 

by Catherine Porter 

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/05/10/two_toronto_holocaust_survivors_meet_their_liberators_65_years_later_porter.html

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I know what I saw. I am a witness. Now that I have told you, you are witnesses, too.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 10, 2013| 1 Comment »

I don’t know Leo but when I saw the headline I thought they were writing about my friends on this site. God Bless, Mr. Hymas.
By Julie Muhlstein, Herald Columnist

Students crowded around the speaker as his talk ended at Everett Community College. They lingered, asking if they could take pictures and posing with him to capture the moment.tudents crowded around the speaker as his talk ended at Everett Community College. They lingered, asking if they could take pictures and posing with him to capture the moment.

Leo Hymas is no hip-hop artist or reality TV star. At 87, the U.S. Army veteran is a keeper of history and a bearer of truth.

“Those who say it didn’t happen are wrong,” said Hymas, who spoke Wednesday as part of the college’s Holocaust Survivor Forums.

He lives on Whidbey Island with his wife, Amy, and is a speaker with the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center.

His audience was rapt, hanging on every word, as Hymas shared memories with Joyce Walker’s Humanities 150D class. This is the 14th year Walker has presented the Holocaust series, which is open to the public. Most speakers have been Holocaust survivors, or lost ancestors during Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of 6 million Jews.

Hymas is not Jewish. His Holocaust story is from the point of view of an American soldier during World War II, a 19-year-old fresh off his family’s Utah dairy farm.

He was with the 97th Infantry Division, H Company, part of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army. In the spring of 1945, they marched through a nearly defeated Germany. “We fought our way across Germany, village to village — sometimes man to man,” Hymas said.

They were preparing to attack Weimar, a picturesque German town, when they came upon a wire enclosure. Hymas recalls the fence, topped by barbed wire mounted on electric insulators. There was a brick building with a tall chimney, and a guard tower. The guards were gone.

The place was Buchenwald, a concentration camp near Weimar. What the liberation forces found there is seared in Hymas’ memory.

“I have seen hundreds and hundreds of naked, rotting bodies stacked like cord wood,” he said. “The smell, I cannot describe. It was burning human flesh.”

There was no fighting. “Suddenly, our fighting force became a humanitarian force,” Hymas said. “You’ve seen the pictures. The people were so emaciated, just skin and bones.

“An order came to touch nothing, but help if you can,” he said. Three generals came to the death camp with their staffs — Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and Patton. Hymas said troops had nicknamed Patton “Old Blood and Guts — his guts, our blood.”

From camp survivors, Hymas heard horror stories of torture, of subsisting on a half-cup of turnip soup mixed with sawdust each day, and of dogs trained to go for the throat.

The Allied forces made townspeople from Weimar carry bodies from the camp to a common grave. “They told us, ‘I’m not a Nazi,'” Hymas said.

Kathleen Bergin is the speakers bureau coordinator for the Seattle-based Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center. While most speakers are Jewish, she said, “Leo offers another perspective. He is one of our most prolific speakers.”

He also is among a dwindling number of people still alive to tell what they saw of the Holocaust firsthand.

“The survivors are elderly, and the liberators tend to be even more so,” Bergin said. “We do have videotaped accounts, but a big part of Holocaust education is preparing for when there aren’t survivors. We have to make this real to kids. When there’s not proof of it standing right in front of them, it’s a challenge.”

Hymas was awarded a Bronze Star Medal for valor. He said he helped capture 91 Germans, “most sent to Nuremberg for war crimes.”

Near the end of his talk, he asked for volunteers. Audience members Terry Myer and Cory Palmieri came forward. First, they held up a Nazi banner, bright red with a huge swastika on it.

“It’s a symbol of the worst evil we have record of,” Hymas said, then asked the volunteers to “wad it up and throw it on the floor.” They then held up a 48-star American flag, “the flag I fought for, and my dear friends died for,” Hymas said. “I hope you love and respect it.”

Retired from an aerospace industry career, he makes time to tell as many people as he can about what hate can do.

“I know what I saw. I am a witness. Now that I have told you, you are witnesses, too,” he told the students. “I’m hoping to influence people like you, so that it can never, ever happen again.”

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20130510/NEWS01/705109903/1056/comm0615

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Holocaust survivors, veterans gather at DC museum

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 29, 2013|

By BRETT ZONGKER, Associated Press
  Monday, April 29, 2013
Frank this morning at the Museum - P. Fredlake

Frank this morning at the Museum – P. Fredlake

Today is the anniversary of the liberation of Dachau. I also got this photo from Peter Fredlake, the director of National Outreach for Teacher Initiatives at the USHMM which he took this morning in Washington.  Big day for Frank!

WASHINGTON (AP) — Elderly survivors of the Holocaust and the veterans who helped liberate them are gathering for what could be their last big reunion at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Some 1,000 survivors and World War II vets are coming together with President Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust activist and writer, on Monday when the museum marks its 20th anniversary. Organizers chose not to wait for the 25th milestone because many survivors and vets may not be alive in another five years.

Clinton and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wiesel, who both dedicated the museum at its opening in 1993, will deliver keynote speeches. On Sunday night, the museum presented its highest honor to World War II veterans who ended the Holocaust. Susan Eisenhower accepted the award on behalf of her grandfather, U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, and all veterans of the era.

The museum also launched a campaign to raise $540 million by 2018 to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive and to combat anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and contemporary genocide. It has already secured gifts totaling $258.7 million. The campaign will double the size of the museum’s endowment by its 25th anniversary. Also, a $15 million gift from Holocaust survivors David and Fela Shapell will help build a new Collections and Conservation Center.

Museum Director Sara Bloomfield said organizers wanted to show Holocaust survivors, veterans and rescuers the effort will continue to honor the memory of 6 million murdered Jews, in part by saving lives and preventing genocide in the future.

“We felt it was important, while that generation is still with us in fairly substantial numbers, to bring them together,” Bloomfield said, “to not only honor them, but in their presence make a commitment to them that not only this institution but the people we reach will carry forward this legacy.”

The museum continues collecting objects, photographs and other evidence of the Holocaust from survivors, veterans and archives located as far away as China and Argentina. Curators expect the collection to double in size over the next decade.

This week, the museum is opening a special, long-term exhibit titled “Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity During the Holocaust.” It includes interviews with perpetrators that have never been shown before, as well as details of mass killings in the former Soviet Union that were only uncovered in more recent years.

Curator Susan Bachrach said the exhibit and its research challenge the idea that the Holocaust was primarily about Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Surveys at the museum show that’s what most visitors believe.

“That’s very comforting to people, because it puts distance between the visitors and who was involved,” Bachrach said.

So, the museum set out to look at ordinary people who looked on and were complicit in the killing and persecution of millions of Jews through greed, a desire for career advancement, peer pressure or other factors. It examines influences “beyond hatred and anti-Semitism,” Bachrach said.

Focusing only on fanatical Nazis would be a serious misunderstanding of the Holocaust, Bloomfield said.

“The Holocaust wouldn’t have been possible, first of all, without enormous indifference throughout Germany and German-occupied Europe, but also thousands of people who were, say, just doing their jobs,” she said, such as a tax official who collected special taxes levied against Jews.

In an opening film, some survivors recall being turned over to Nazi authorities in front of witnesses who did nothing. “The whole town was assembled … looking at the Jews leaving,” one survivor recalls.

Steven Fenves was a boy at the time. He recalled how in 1944, Hungary, allied with Nazi Germany, forced his family out of their apartment. The family was deported to Auschwitz, where Fenves’ mother was gassed.

“One of the nastiest memories I have is going on that journey and people were lined up, up the stairs, up to the door of the apartment, waiting to ransack whatever we left behind, cursing at us, yelling at us, spitting at us as we left,” he said in an interview with the museum.

The museum located images of bystanders looking on as Jews were detained, humiliated and taken away.

Non-Jews were also punished for violating German policies against the mixing of ethnic groups. For the first time, the museum is showing striking, rare footage of a ritualistic shaming of a Polish girl and a German boy for having a relationship. They are marched through the streets of a town in Poland, where the film was located in an attic. Dozens of people look on as Nazi officers cut the hair of the two teenagers. They are forced to look at their nearly bald heads in a mirror before their hair is burned.

“It’s hard not to focus on the cruelty that’s being perpetrated on this young couple,” Bachrach said. “But what we really want people to look at … is all the other people who are standing around watching this.”

Other items displayed include dozens of bullets excavated from the site of a mass grave in former Soviet territory and registration cards from city offices in Western and Southern Europe labeling people with a “J” for Jew.

The federally funded museum’s theme for its 20th anniversary is “Never Again: What You Do Matters.” The museum devotes part of its work and research to stopping current and preventing future genocides. A study released by the museum last month found that the longer the current conflict in Syria continues, the greater the danger that mass sectarian violence results in genocide.

Much more is still being learned about the Holocaust, as well, Bloomfield said. The museum is compiling an encyclopedia of all incarceration sites throughout Europe. When the project began, scholars expected to list 10,000 such sites. Now the number stands at 42,000.

The museum opened in 1993 as a living memorial to the Holocaust to inspire people worldwide to prevent genocide. A presidential commission called for such a museum in 1979. Since opening, it has counted more than 30 million visitors. The museum also provides resources for survivors. It has partnered with Ancestry.com to begin making the museum’s 170 million documents searchable online through the World Memory Project.

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