"for the sake of humanity"… A small town American high school history project changes lives worldwide. These are the observations of a veteran teacher- on the Power of Teaching, the importance of the study of History, and especially the lessons we must learn, and teach, on the Holocaust. Click on "Holocaust Survivors, Liberators Reunited" tab above to begin.
Survivor Micha and his wife Louise recently returned from a trip to Bergen Belsen, Farsleben and Hilersleben. In 2006 Micha contacted me and has since met me and his fellow survivors and liberators many times, being one of our featured speakers for the first reunion here at the school. I’m including some photos above, and some of Louise’s notes below.
“…turns out the concrete underpass visible in some of George’s photos (above) helps with a positive [identification] of exactly where the front of the train was…
Christian W also indicated that the presence of the individuals with papers on the three trains wasn’t a random thing — it might have been a strategic move to separate prisoners who still had some potential value from the unfortunate souls being sent from the other camps at the end of the war. As I understand it, there is some evidence that Himmler decided to move all his “valuable” human pawns who could be exchanged for German POWs to a single more “secure” (?) location as it became clear that the Germans were going to lose the war soon, and he wanted these individuals handy to support negotiations for trades and deals. The [Bergen Belsen] Memorial even presents the routes the various trains took — the Farsleben train was the first and ran into difficulties moving south because of damage to major bridges. As a result, the other two trains took different paths.”
In recent correspondence with Christian Wolpers of the Bergen Belsen Memorial in Germany, he brought my attention to “the drawings of the Hungarian artist Ervin Abadi ,who was also on the train and made some watercolour drawings of the train, , the village of Zielitz (the rear end of the train was closer to Zielitz than to Farsleben, so some of the liberated say that they were liberated near Zielitz), Magdeburg and Bergen-Belsen.” Here are two of them.
I’m back from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
As promised, it was a very intense 6 day workshop with 13 other teachers from across the US, wonderfully moving and at times tough to fathom but always engrossing and enlightening. I met some friends for life here- these educators and I share a bond that runs very deep. We each have our own missions to fulfill, with the Museum staff and each other for support.
I am a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellow. It’s a responsibility not to be taken lightly.
I, Sara Atzmon Gottdiener am grateful to you in my name and the names of my fellow survivors of the death train you saved from a sure death so many years ago. You and your division have saved us at the last moment.
I was 12 years old then and was weighing about 37.5lb.
Although the great distance and the fact that I don’t know you personally, I have to confess that within my soul I feel very close to you as if I’ve known you all my life.
You then appeared to us like angels from heaven and saved us all from a sure death.
I always wanted to know, how did we seem to you? What did you think
about us? All of you were at your best, winning the war for the whole
world and on the other hand we, who didn’t even look like human beings!
We the Gottdiener family have lost 60 of our own family alone through
all kinds of indescribable deaths…
Half a year in Bergen Belzen was a university for life. We didn’t take a
shower for half a year, we were covered with lice and boils. We got once
a week bread made of sawdust about one slice a day and soup made of
potato skins. Recently I watched a documentary showing the kitchen
supervisor signing a receipt for meat delivered from the crematorium,
and so without knowing we became cannibals. The Dutch Jews were our
neighbors. I watched the piles of bodies coming out of their camp every
day, among them was Anna Frank. (in my work I try to draw their
prayers).
On April 6th 1945 we were taken out at night, the British were bombing,
we were given live typhoid vaccines and the march to the train started for
7 kilometers. Most of us were by now sick or very weak. We were 6 days
in the train until it stopped. The German soldiers asked for civilian clothes
and told us to say to the Americans that we were treated well by them.
They ran away. We saw a whole German hospital take off, bandaged and
all. That night we found ourselves in the middle of a cannon battle
between the Americans and the Germans.
The next day, April 13th 1945, [was] a sunny and quiet day. Two of my sisters
went looking for food, on their way they met you our “American Angels”
and you know the rest of the story. I remember the soup you mentioned
that you have brought from Hilersleben. (I didn’t draw the picture yet)…
We were all half dead and wouldn’t have last another week.
So, the fact is that you came along and gave us our lives back-a new life!
Three months following our release we were finally in the Land of Israel…
As of today we’re 8 remaining brothers and sisters that aren’t young
anymore, but we remember, never forgot! We are busy commemorating
our terrible ordeal, in schools, army bases telling about the miracles that
kept us alive so many years ago…
I will be very happy to meet you and the rest of our saviors as soon as we can organize this meeting.
I hope you have surfed my website, there you can see some of my paintings and hear some of the music.
Yesterday, May 21, was the 63rd anniversary of the burning to the ground of Bergen Belsen by the British Army.
“Three American soldiers, one of them named Max. who liberated the train.” This message was from the son of Dina Rubinstein of Israel. It came to me on the 63rd anniversary of the liberation. The guys may be members of the 743rd Tank Battalion. Anyone out there know who they are?
Dear Matt
Thanks
Today is the13th.
My mother still considers its to be her birthday, pity she is not in condition to come and meet you all.
My late father passed the same route that Mr. Ernest Kan did and met my mother then in Magdeburg. Since that day on they were together till the day he passed away.
I will show these clips on Saturday when my mother and all the rest of my family gathers at my place for the Passover eve dinner.
Even though I do not know you personally, and sure you do not know me, you mean a lot to me, you touched me deep inside.
I have no more words to explain my feelings, just want to thank you all for that wonderful gesture you made to my parents.
This evening my wife and I spent an hour with filmmaker Ken Burns in the company of 300 other individuals, most seemingly well educated and literate. (I wonder how many other history teachers were in the audience.) We sat in the front row as he read from the introduction to his book, but the true passion came forth in the question and answer period that followed. Then he burned with the intensity that comes from the conviction that you know you are right and that your work has amounted to something because IT MATTERS. (I recall his impatience at one particular comment or question, saying “All you have to do is visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and see the canisters of Zyklon B, and become aware of the millions of pages of documents kept by the Germans themselves, to allay any question about the magnitude of the Holocaust”.)
For me, and clearly for him, it has never been about “my country, right or wrong” or even the idea of a “Greatest Generation”… during the Second World War, some very courageous people followed their convictions not to kill and instead became social pariahs and /or incarcerated individuals. (Read John H. Abbott’s “Reflections on Machismo” interview in Studs Terkel’s The Good War.) For me, teaching history is about teaching the kids what happened by letting the stories unfold, to engage or to repel. We learn that history is never black and white because life is not, and has never been.
What motivated and pushed him to work on this film on the Second World War boiled down to two things- the fact that this generation is fading very quickly, but more importantly that our nation’s collective memory of what happened sixty-odd years ago seems to be dying faster than those men and women are. One the one hand, we feel unabashed gratitude. On the other, we feel sheer outrage at the fact that what’s become standardized ( besides test, test, test, or more likely, because of it) a kid can graduate high school with honors and still not know that much about the context of his own history… I’ve been outraged for a long time, but I’d like to think that in sharing some of this outrage with my students, they can pick up on its importance… Burns and I have been on the same page for a long time. I’ve been conducting these oral histories for almost my entire career in the classroom. Thank God his work is starting to raise awareness among educators to the point that it is becoming almost fashionable.
At the book signing I was a bit disappointed because it became immediately clear that he had to get through this ritual as quickly as possible to satisfy the line of people who had paid their 55 dollars for their 30 seconds with him. Laura and I were nearly the first persons in line and it was a little nuts, he wasn’t too relaxed, but I can’t blame him. (Getting 20,000 hits on our ww2 website on a single weekend and equivalent of 67 pages of guestbook posts/emails reading about dads, uncles, granddads who fought in the war was an honor, but a bit overwhelming- I can only imagine what it is like for him…) Still, in my Ralphy “Christmas Story” fantasy-world I got to tell him what we have been doing at our school, making sure that none of our students graduates as ignorant as the average American is about his own history. I got to tell him that he was one of my heroes and he got to tell me that no, we were his heroes…
But honestly, that’s not really important. I did manage to get my books signed, one for my student Sara, and slip him the DVD of the Holocaust Survivor-Liberator Reunion that my class brought about. While he hardly looked at it before tucking it under the table, if he’s true to his passion, and he obviously is, he will be curious enough to watch at least part of it. He’ll see that there’s at least one school whose students KNOW the importance of history. Thanks, Ken, for a great evening.
In the video post below he expresses some of his outrage. (It’s also cute because if you listen closely, you can hear my wife ask me if I understand him…)
Teaching History Matters 