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Posts Tagged ‘Holocaust Education’

Dachau and the photo in his wallet. The question he never got to ask.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 29, 2026| 1 Comment »

April 30 1945 Headlines. Hangs in my classroom.
April 30 1945 Headlines, on display in my classroom.

Eighty-one years ago today, American soldiers of the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions arrived at Dachau, in southern Germany. This is a post I have shared in the past. I think it is important.

Today, if the anniversary is brought up at all, some of us might respond with a vacant stare. More might shrug and turn away. I suppose that is to be expected. But you know me. I just think that as a nation, sometimes we allow things to slip from memory at our peril.

It was real, and it happened. And it was American GIs who overran this camp and many others in the closing days of World War II.

The men of the 42nd and 45th Infantry Division arrived independently of each other, here, in southern Germany, at Dachau, on this day. A concentration camp, they were told. Their noses gave them a hint of what they were about to uncover, miles before the camp appeared in sight.

Read the headlines, above. Note the subarticle:

Boxcars of Dead at Dachau. 32,000 captives freed.

American soldiers view the bodies in one of the open railcars of the Dachau death train. USHMM
American soldiers view the bodies in one of the open railcars of the Dachau death train. USHMM

And so after some resistance, into the camp they entered. Life changing events were about to unfold for the American soldier.

***

For me, it’s not about hero worship, or glorifying the liberator or any World War II soldier by placing him on a pedestal. Our time with them is now limited, but many of the liberating soldiers I know push back at this, to the point of rejecting the term, “liberator”- “It all sounds so exalted, so glamorous” said one. But they will all accept the term, “eyewitness”.

Witnesses to the greatest crime in the history of the world.

So instead I think it is about honoring their experiences, their shock, the horror, the puking and the crying, the rage-and then, the American GIs recognizing that something had to be done. And they did suffer for it, for trying to do the right thing. Many tried to help by offering food to starving prisoners who just were not ready to handle it, only to see them drop dead. Or having to manhandle these emaciated victims who were tearing away at each other as food was being offered.

Some guys never got over it. How could you?

I have learned so much over the past few years from these guys, just through the way that they carried themselves and tried to cope with what they witnessed. In my World War II studies and Holocaust class, we discuss these issues at length. I’m so lucky to be able to teach it.

A few years back, I was privileged to teach a lesson to my high school seniors for NBC Learn, which was shared with other districts across the nation. Later, I stumbled upon this piece by the late author Tony Hays, who writes about his liberator father and his own encounter with the past. Thanks to the Get It Write folks; the original link is at the bottom.

***

Dachau Will Always Be With Us

by Tony Hays

This is not so much a post about writing as one about a writer’s education, about one of those experiences that molds us, shapes us into storytellers. I read yesterday the story of Joseph Corbsie, whose father, a World War II veteran, left him with a special legacy from the war, from the hideous Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. I feel a particular kinship with Mr. Corbsie.

My father, Robert Hays, was the son of an alcoholic tenant farmer in rural west Tennessee. If the appellation “dirt poor” fit anyone, it fit my grandfather’s family. Daddy served in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 30s. He and my mother, who was in the woman’s equivalent of the CCC, working as a nurse’s aide at Western State Mental Hospital in Bolivar, Tennessee, met on a blind date in early 1940 and married in September of that year.

But just over a year later, Pearl Harbor happened. America was in the war. My father was among the first of those drafted in 1942. I won’t bore you with the details, but he participated in the North African, Salerno, Anzio, and southern France invasions, saved by the luck of the draw from Normandy. But they slogged through France and on to Germany. On April 29, 1945, Allied troops liberated the Dachau concentration camp. I don’t know whether he entered Dachau that day or the next, but that he was there within hours of the liberation is beyond dispute. A few months later, after more than three years overseas, he came home.

In later years, he would talk occasionally about the war, providing anecdotes that showed the chaos and random chance of battle. He spoke of driving through Kasserine Pass in North Africa just hours before the Germans killed thousands of Allied troops in a stunning attack. He spoke of a friend, defending his position from a foxhole, who was thought dead after an artillery shell landed right next to him. When the dust cleared, the friend was buried up to his neck in dirt, but did not have a scratch on him. He spoke often of Anzio, where he was wounded, and of the massive German air assaults on those soldiers clinging to that tiny sliver of beach along the Italian coast.

But he never spoke of Dachau.

The bodies of former prisoners are piled in the crematorium mortuary in the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp. Dachau, Germany, April 29, 1945.
The bodies of former prisoners are piled in the crematorium mortuary in the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp. Dachau, Germany, April 29, 1945. USHMM.

Ever.

When he died in 1981, we found a photo in his wallet. An old sepia-toned shot like others he had taken during the war, pictures that he kept in an old brown bag. But this one was different.

It showed a pile of naked bodies. Well, really more skeletons than not, with their skin stretched pitifully over their bones. On the back, as had been his habit, was typed simply “Dachau.”

I was confused. Why would he keep this one photo in his wallet all of those years? Especially a photo of a place and event that he never spoke about. It obviously had some deeper meaning for him than the other photographs. If it had been a shot of the building he was in when he was wounded (hit by an artillery shell), I could have seen that. A reminder of his closest brush with death. Yeah, I could buy that. But this macabre photo? That, I couldn’t see.

So, for the next fifteen years, I remained puzzled.

Until the fall of 1996. I was working in Poland, and I had some time off. I took an overnight bus from Katowice, Poland to Munich. It was an interesting trip all in itself. We sat in a line of buses at midnight on the Polish/German border, waiting for our turn to cross, next to a cemetery, as if in some Cold War spy movie. I remember passing Nuremburg and thinking that my father had been there at the end of the war. And then there was Munich.

I spent a day or two wandering through the streets, drinking beer in the Marienplatz. I’m a historical novelist, so the short trip out to Dachau was a no-brainer. Of course it was as much my father’s connection with it as anything else that spurred the visit. But I’m not sure that I was completely aware of that at the time.

Dachau literally sits just on the outskirts of the Munich metropolitan area. I looked at the sign on the train station with a sadness, wondering for how many people that had been one of the last things they saw. It was only later that I discovered there had been another depot for those passengers.

The Dachau Memorial is a place of deep emotion. In the camp proper, mostly all that are left are the foundations of the barracks. One has been reconstructed to give an idea of how horrible life must have been. The camp was originally intended to hold 6,000 inmates; when the Allies liberated Dachau in 1945, they found 30,000. The museum and exhibits are primarily in the old maintenance building. I looked with awe at life size photos of prisoners machine gunned, their hands torn to ribbons from the barbed wire they had tried to climb in a futile attempt at escape.

I followed the visitors (I can’t call them tourists) north to where you crossed over into the crematorium area. It was there that the full brunt of what had taken place at Dachau really hit me. A simple brick complex, it seemed so peaceful on the fall day that I stood before it. But as I read the plaques and consulted my guidebook, as I stepped through the door and actually saw the “shower” rooms where the prisoners were gassed, as I stared into the open doors of the ovens, I felt a rage unlike any I had ever known consume me.[i]

That night, I went to the famous Hofbrauhaus in Munich, to wash the images of the ovens away with some beer. I hadn’t been there long when an elderly American couple sat at the table. They were from Florida, a pleasant couple. He had been a young lieutenant in the American army on the push into Munich. In fact, it had been his pleasure to liberate the Hofbrauhaus from the Germans.

Of course, I asked the question. “Were you at Dachau?”

He didn’t answer for several seconds, tears glistening in the corners of his eyes as his wife’s hand covered his and squeezed. Finally, he nodded, reached into a back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

With a flick of his wrist, a photo, just as wrinkled, just as bent, as the one my father had carried landed on the table. It wasn’t the same scene, but one just like it.

Here was my chance, the opportunity to ask the question I had never been able to ask my father. I pulled the photo from my own wallet and lay it next to his. “Why? Why have you carried it so long? To remind you of the horror of Dachau, of what had been done here?”

His face carried the faintest of smiles as he shook his head. “No, son, to remind us of the horrors that we are capable of, to remind us not to go down that road again.”

The difference was subtle, but in that moment, I learned two lessons invaluable to a writer, subtle differences are important, and when you want to know the truth, go to the source.

As I sit here now and look at that same photograph, I realize that it was my father’s legacy to me, of Dachau. Joe Corbsie’s father left him something more tangible, a reminder of the same thing for the same reason, but more forcefully stated — a tiny box of human ash from the ovens.

Dachau is still with us, and I hope the legacy left by our fathers always will be.

The late Tony Hays.

[i] Where the prisoners were gassed- “In 1942, the crematorium area was constructed next to the main camp. It included the old crematorium and the new crematorium (Barrack X) with a gas chamber. There is no credible evidence that the gas chamber in Barrack X was used to murder human beings. Instead, prisoners underwent “selection”; those who were judged too sick or weak to continue working were sent to the Hartheim “euthanasia” killing center near Linz, Austria. Several thousand Dachau prisoners were murdered at Hartheim. Further, the SS used the firing range and the gallows in the crematoria area as killing sites for prisoners.” Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Dachau” Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau

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She Was Told to Live and Tell the Story.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 19, 2026|

She Was Told to Live and Tell the Story:

Aliza Vitis-Shomron and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Eighty-three years ago this April, the Jews remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto did something the world needs to pause and note: they fought back. It was not at all what some term, ‘sheep to the slaughter’; no, not by a long shot. Resistance took many forms, and this ‘incident’ deserves more than a footnote in history.

Against tanks, artillery, and the full machinery of the SS, roughly 700 young men and women armed mostly with pistols and homemade grenades held the diabolical German death machine at bay for nearly a month. It was the largest Jewish uprising of World War II, and the first significant urban revolt against Nazi occupation anywhere in Europe. On April 19, 1943 — the eve of Passover — the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. By May 16, the ghetto had been reduced to rubble.

Most of the fighters died there. A small number escaped. Fewer still survived the war.

And then there is Aliza.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Warsaw Ghetto, established by the Germans in October 1940 and sealed that November, was the largest Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Europe, holding approximately 400,000 Jews in an area of only 1.3 square miles. From July 22 to September 21, 1942 — in what became known as the “Great Action” — German SS and police units deported roughly 265,000 Warsaw Jews to the Treblinka killing center, killing approximately 35,000 more inside the ghetto during the operation itself.

By early 1943, approximately 70,000 to 80,000 Jews remained. In response, the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) was formed, eventually fielding roughly 500 fighters alongside a second force of about 250. Together they stunned German forces on the first day of fighting, forcing troops back outside the ghetto wall. At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or in hiding, and the SS deported approximately 42,000 survivors to forced-labor camps where most were murdered in November 1943.

(Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia. encyclopedia.ushmm.org)

A GIRL FROM WARSAW

Aliza Melamed was born in Warsaw in 1928, the daughter of a prosperous family whose life was upended, like every Jewish life in the city, by the German invasion of September 1939. She was eleven years old when the bombs fell and the siege began, twelve when the ghetto was sealed and she was required to wear the white armband with its blue Star of David, and thirteen when she joined Hashomer Hatzair — the Zionist youth movement that would become the nucleus of the armed underground resistance.

In her memoir Youth in Flames — composed partly from a diary she kept at the time, partly from memory written down in Israel in the years immediately after the war — she described the ghetto with a teeming clarity that has never left me since I first read it:

“Will I be able to describe it, the largest ghetto in Europe? The overcrowding, the feeling of humiliation, the raging typhoid epidemic, the filthy gray sidewalks, and the houses crammed with masses of refugees from the country towns? Hundreds of thousands of people wanting to survive, running around like mice, trapped in a maze?”

Through the mass deportations of the summer of 1942, the teenager watched friends and neighbors disappear into the machinery of destruction. By winter she had become a courier for the resistance, moving secret messages and plans for the uprising through the ghetto’s streets and passages. She was just fourteen years old, and in risking her very life, no longer a child.

THE ORDER TO LIVE

As spring 1943 approached, it became clear to everyone remaining in the ghetto what the Germans were preparing. Aliza describes the atmosphere of those weeks with the terrible lucidity of someone who has spent decades processing a memory that never really recedes — the bunkers being dug in cellars, the false entrances hidden behind kitchen stoves, the engineers turning up with plans and tools, the growing certainty that this was the end. The young people in the ghetto were no longer preparing to survive; they were preparing to choose the manner of their own death.

Aliza’s family made the agonizing decision to split up in order to increase their chances. Her mother, whose appearance allowed her to pass as Aryan, took Aliza’s younger sister into hiding on the other side of the ghetto wall, relying on bribery, subterfuge, and nerves of steel. Her father volunteered to go to a work camp near Lublin. And Aliza — who wanted desperately to stay and fight alongside the resistance — was told by its leadership that at fourteen she was too young. They needed her to live, to escape to the Aryan side, and to carry the story out of the ghetto, no matter what happened to everyone else inside.

She wrote about the last moment with her father:

“We stood at the entrance of the house. Father was to leave me there and go off. He was pale and had a tormented look. He could not move. He hugged me, kissed me, and went off. He came back a moment later, and we embraced again. I did not cry. I clung to him. Again he left. No, I saw him come back to me once more… ‘Daddy, goodbye, see you again. You’d better go!’ One more hug, and he left. Left altogether.”

She never saw her father again, he was murdered at the Majdanek camp. Years later, when Aliza was leading a tour of Israeli high school students through that camp, she broke down on the very steps where the executions had been carried out — steps I would later walk myself on a teacher’s study trip to Poland, not knowing at the moment I stood there what connection they held. And upon encountering the pile of cremated remains the size of a small house, I too had my own encounter with being overwhelmed.

“The former Jewish Quarter in Warsaw is no more,”

The uprising began on April 19, 1943, and by the time the SS commander announced to Berlin that “The former Jewish Quarter in Warsaw is no more,” Aliza was already in hiding on the Aryan side of the city, passing as a Polish girl named something other than Aliza Melamed.

BERGEN-BELSEN, AND THE TRAIN

Survival on the Aryan side was its own sustained terror — a wrong glance, a neighbor’s suspicion, a stranger on the street who recognized something in her bearing or her eyes. Eventually Aliza and her family were caught up in one of the war’s cruelest deceptions: the Hotel Polski scheme, in which Jews were offered false foreign passports and the promise of safe passage to exchange camps, in exchange for everything they had. Many of those who took the offer were taken to a nearby prison and shot. Aliza, her mother, and her sister were taken to Bergen-Belsen, where the cold, the starvation, the lice, and the death were relentless.

And then, in April 1945, an evacuation order came.

“On April 6, an unexpected order came to prepare for evacuation. We heard the thunder of cannons in the distance; they said that the city of Hannover was in the hands of the Allied armies… Evacuation? To where? To the unknown.”

About 2500 prisoners were loaded onto a train that wandered for six days through the chaos of a collapsing Germany, the front lines moving on all sides, the guards increasingly uncertain what to do or where to go. On April 13, 1945, with soldiers of the American 30th Infantry Division and 743rd Tank Battalion closing in near the village of Farsleben, the guards abandoned the train and disappeared into the countryside.

Aliza was now seventeen years old. She had survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Bergen-Belsen, and six days on a train going nowhere. When the transport of broken down passenger carriages and cattle cars finally stopped in the middle of a ravine and people began climbing out into the April air, she wrote:

“What will happen now, to us? We were alone. Slowly, people started leaving the carriages; the train was standing in the middle of a field. I also got off, with my faithful friend Tusia. We saw a small pond not far away, and our people were catching little fish there. Those among them with initiative found a tin, made a fire, and cooked the fish. We joined in, glad to have something to eat.”

FINDING HER, NEARLY EIGHTY YEARS LATER

I first contacted Aliza Vitis-Shomron in 2016, when I was writing A Train Near Magdeburg, and she graciously gave me permission to use excerpts from Youth in Flames throughout the book. Her writing became one of the narrative spines of the entire project — a voice from inside the catastrophe that is young and precise and unflinching all at once, the diary of a girl who was told to survive so that she could testify, and who has spent every year since making good on that promise.

In April 2023, just days after CNN had featured her as part of their Holocaust Remembrance Day coverage, our film crew traveled to Kibbutz Givat Oz in northern Israel to interview her, on a quiet Saturday Shabbat morning. Her son Hanan meets us at the gate; he hops out of his car all smiles, beaming, greeting us so warmly, profuse in his thanks, and leads us up to his mother’s house, a corner of the kibbutz she had transformed over the years into a kind of garden, with plants and trees nurtured all around the house into something that just symbolized Israel, the biblical land, flowering in the desert.

She had just celebrated her 95th birthday, and she came out to meet us composed and ready, wearing a sweater, her white hair flowing, and as our crew set up the camera and lights she clipped a pin to her blouse, her 95-year-old fingers working carefully at the tiny clasp. When Lee Shackleford, our scriptwriter, asked what it signified, her translator smiled broadly: “Her special award for Valor Against Fascism — given to her by Israeli President Shimon Peres.” She is a national hero.

We were humbled to be in her presence, surrounded by the photos of her family that testified, “We triumphed, and flourished, despite Hitler and his minions.” She told us the story — the ghetto, her mother and sister, being sent out by the fighters with the instruction to live, Bergen-Belsen, the train, liberation — and at the memory of soldiers wanting the barely-alive seventeen-year-old to dance for them, she laughed with a warmth and humor that surprised everyone in the room. But she expressed to us, that it did not feel right to her—that underneath it was the grief that never entirely leaves: the depression, the guilt, the question that haunted her for years. Why did I live?

THE LAST SURVIVOR

Aliza Vitis-Shomron is now 97 years old and is widely recognized as the last living survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — the last person alive who was inside the ghetto when the fighters rose, who carried messages for the resistance through those streets, who watched everything she had known burned to rubble and declared by the SS to be finished. She has spent the more than eight decades since fulfilling, with extraordinary commitment, the charge the resistance placed on her when she was fourteen: to live, and to tell the truth of what happened there.

She said it best herself, to CNN in 2023:

“It is important for me to tell the story, not so much my story, but how we fought bravely. If we don’t tell the world how we Jews fought, the world will only look at us as victims who went like lambs to the slaughter. But we did fight, and we did it in so many different ways. We need to tell people the truth.”

At the very end of our interview, she spoke of her fears for the future — the dwindling number of eyewitnesses, the weight of a story that will soon have no one left who lived it passing to those of us who only know it secondhand. “Who will keep my story alive?” she asked.

Our director, Mike Edwards, said quietly, but with a ready conviction: “We will.”

As we left Kibbutz Givat Oz that April morning, my wife Laura put her hands gently on Aliza’s cheek in farewell — a fleeting, wordless connection across eighty years of history, reaching all the way back to the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. We drove away through the quiet Israeli morning carrying something that is difficult to name: gratitude, grief, the particular weight of having sat in the presence of someone who has seen the worst of what human beings are capable of, and who has chosen, every day since, to answer it with testimony and with life.

The responsibility of that is not lost on any of us who were witnesses that morning. In the Hebrew scriptures, when the prophet Elijah’s time on earth was ending, he passed his cloak to his apprentice Elisha — a gesture that signified not merely succession, but the transfer of sacred purpose and spiritual power. We think of that image often, in this work. In our moments with her, something passed between the last survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the people who had come to make sure her story would not die with her. We have accepted that mantle, gladly and with humility.

The fighters at Mila 18, the bunker command post in the ghetto where Mordechai Anielewicz and many of the resistance fighters breathed their last, were right to send her out. They did not go quietly into the dark. Neither will their memory, not as long as there are people willing to carry it forward.

Memorial to Warsaw Uprising
Memorial to Warsaw Uprising. Matthew Rozell 2013.

Aliza kept her promise to the dead; what the Nazis tried to erase, Aliza spent a lifetime refusing to let the memory, the legacy of the Jews who fought back against the machine of death, die.

That legacy is now ours, an obligation to honor and carry forward.

— Matthew Rozell, April 19, 2026, the 83rd anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Aliza Vitis-Shomron’s account appears throughout A Train Near Magdeburg, available at matthewrozellbooks.com. The feature film A Train Near Magdeburg is in production, coming 2027. To learn more about the progress of the film, visit MagdeburgTrain.com and to support, the Augusta Chiwy Foundation.

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APRIL 13, 1945. The New Witnesses.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 13, 2021| 8 Comments »

On this day the Train Near Magdeburg, pictured above in the 743rd Tank Battalion’s After Action Report following the 4-13-1945 liberation near the Elbe River, was just beginning its week-long final journey from the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

I think back to nineteen summers ago, when I sat down to record the memories of an 80-year-old tank commander, Carrol Walsh, who had fought from Normandy, into Germany, back into Belgium for the Battle of the Bulge, and then back across Hitler’s Western Wall, who almost forgot to tell me the story of the train fifty-six years before. About his rejection of the mantle of “LIBERATOR”, but his acceptance of being a WITNESS, of being a symbol of the army that did something about what they saw.

I think today about George Gross, the other tank commander that day who had the camera and the photographs to prove that 2500 souls on their way to being murdered were in fact REAL, that the event DID happen, and that the Holocaust would never be forgotten. Of his years recounting the girls on that train, the children, and speaking to them and meeting the ones who could make the pilgrimage to meet him.

I think about Frank Towers, the lieutenant charged with getting these poor people out of harm’s way, as a new battle for the city of Magdeburg was about to unfold. The same Frank who excitedly beat a path to my door sixty-one years later to explain his role, and who went on with train survivor’s daughter Varda Weisskopf and I to track down over 275 survivors of that train all those years later, organizing over 11 reunions on 3 continents over 10 years.

I think today about the medic Walter Gantz, who suffered nightmares for decades after treating the victims on the train for six weeks after liberation, some literally dying on him, his trauma evident sixty-six years later in recalling carrying in his arms a sixty-pound fifteen-year-old girl’s body down the stairs in the middle of the night to a makeshift tent morgue. Of his call to my classroom to introduce himself, telling these thoughts to my high school seniors, and the salving of his scars in getting to speak to the former young people he saved so many decades later.

I think about all the beloved survivors and their families―such loving people who broke down, cried, laughed, danced with their liberators and fellow American WWII soldiers―so many whom I hold close in my heart forever.

I think about the words of one of them every year, an annual email that would arrive on this day from Leslie Meisels, recalling with his survivor “twins” the anniversary of their “re -birth”, their good fortune and gratitude for their liberating heroes, the miracles of survival and liberation, and the miracle of meeting them again.

And I wonder again why God put me on this path to bring a bit of healing to the world.

I have asked Him, ‘why me’, over and over.

So we planned a trip to the proposed 75th anniversary of liberation ceremony with survivors, 2nd and 3rd Generation survivors and liberating soldiers’ families. Funds were raised and a monument created. The pandemic hit, the event was postponed, and in the meantime, several survivor friends have passed. One wonders what it all means, from time to time. But German high schoolers and their teacher and others have gotten involved in the project to honor the survivors, and have been fortunate enough to meet some very special ones. Our film project is back on track, the monument has been laid, and I have published a Young Adult version of the story.

But as I string these thoughts together, I’m reminded of the notes I got in my email inbox so early on the morning of the 75th anniversary from Germany at the liberation site, and again today on the 76th, so I think also about these German students so focused now on learning more about what transpired in their country, in their own backyard―not out of a sense of atonement for the deeds of generations past―no one can atone for those crimes, and frankly that is not their ‘job’―but simply out of LOVE.

LOVE. And HOPE. And maybe even FAITH.

And I still see these young adults as some sort of new symbol, the newest witnesses, at once comforting and profound and at once a source of light, of life, and yes maybe re-birth.

Last year I could not witness the planned re-unification of the saved and the saviors, the healing touches passing in the land where the crimes were perpetrated, but in reading these narratives and seeing these photographs I am renewed by witnessing a new generation arising out of the utter destruction, the evil, and the hatred of 75 plus years ago― in this form of a girl and her teenage friends planting new seeds, literally, at this site where people expired with the words “SALVATION” and “FREEDOM” on their lips, and I see from afar the honoring of the goodness that radiated from the deeds of those American soldiers, really not so long ago.

My name is Johanna, I am 19 years old and from Wolmirstedt near Farsleben. I have always taken a huge interest in history, but other than the important happenings and times you get taught at school, I would rather be told the unknown stories, the events that, in the grand scheme of things seemed so unimportant, but still impacted numerous people deeply, moved them enormously and, unfortunately, are forgotten about way too often.
When I first heard the story of the train, I thought to myself: “This cannot actually have happened so close to my home, otherwise we would have surely heard about it before. How could this remarkable story have been forgotten?”

1945 this day . The hill behind Johanna and the stone is visible. people were dead or dying there. George C Gross

So, I joined the project group of the story of the “Stranded Train”, and what started out as wanting to learn more  about what had actually happened on  April 13, 1945 and also seizing the opportunity to speak English more often, soon turned into this mission that I just could not let go… I suddenly found myself doing more and more research, about people who were a part of these events all those years ago and almost naturally , the stories of the survivors,  those who liberated them, and those who took them into their homes after this train had stopped right on their  doorstep, all became a part of my life.

SCREENSHOT OF ‘A MIGHTY GIRL’ POST. CLICK TO READ ORIGINAL. [THEY ACTUALLY READ THE BOOK…]

RECENT UPDATES: A recent write-up on A Train Near Magdeburg was posted by “A Mighty Girl” on their FB page, with 2.5 M followers. I was impressed, they actually read the book, and continue to empower girls and young women, featured especially in the Young Adult version of the book.

Our film plans were sidelined, along with the rest of life, but now are back on track. Seeking sponsorship at all levels, especially corporate, for our PBS distributor-accepted film. Details on benefits and how to help are here (OPENS AS PDF). Thank you if you have given in the past, and be assured that it will happen!

The Young Adult version of our book is here, if you would like to check it out.

The Young Adult version is here.

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27 Gallons of Blood.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 4, 2019| 3 Comments »

“To Mom and Dad, Babe” WW2 medic, Walter ‘Babe’ Gantz, left

The Old Coach is being buried today. As I write this, he is being eulogized by those who knew him and loved him best. Losing an old soldier is a heavy road I have been down many times, but it’s taken me a week to compose my thoughts on best serving his memory.

In a previous Army life, combat medic Walter Gantz of the 95th Medical Battalion was known as the ‘Sharpshooter’, not for killing people in wartime, but for his uncanny ability to sight in on impossible to find veins in skin-and-bones-bodies racked with disease, malnutrition, and dehydration with a life-giving needle. And he went on giving life after the war, leading by example and taking the needle himself, personally donating 27 gallons of blood to the American Red Cross and spearheading the collection of thousands more in his hometown.

I last talked to Babe, as he liked to sign off in his letters, a few months ago. It had crossed my mind to call him again on his 95th birthday this year, November 1st, but I guess I was busy or put it off to the weekend, figuring I still had time.

I wanted to ask him if he would like to return to Germany with us this coming April, to the site of the Holocaust train liberation of the Train Near Magdeburg and a monument unveiling for the 75th anniversary, in the presence of survivors and 2nd and 3rd generation descendants of survivors and other American liberators associated with the liberation of the train. And to meet the German schoolkids, one a 17-year-old who became a pen pal for a while, when I told her to write to him with her questions. Of course, he wrote back!

You see, Walter was a hero to a lot of people. Mike, the filmmaker for the documentary we are working on, remembers driving many hours to pull up at his house to meet him, to get an interview for our film—”I got out of my car, Walter took my hand and looked me straight in the eye and thanked me for coming to tell the story.”

Walter died on November 27th, in the morning, exactly a week ago. His son-in-law Ken reached out to me shortly afterwards, and I have been struggling to find the words ever since; it did not register at first because it just did not seem possible. When I met him in April—he was waiting for me in the lobby of the hotel. He had arrived an hour early, having driven himself to the hotel where we were staying.

I don’t have many heroes. But I met one in April. WW2 combat medic, Walter Gantz–and he squeezed my hands so hard…

Walter got emotional. The Old Coach in his red athletic hoodie grabbed my two hands with the grip of the 20-year-old he had been as a medic at Hillersleben, the captured German Luftwaffe base and weapons proving ground 74 years before. “Matt Rozell, God bless you!” Mike snapped a picture. “It’s a good thing I am as cool as a cucumber; otherwise I would be real nervous about all this!”

We talked for a while. He lived only three minutes away in the hills overlooking the city, the ‘Polish Alps’ as he calls it, where his parents had raised him, most of the community having emigrated from Poland in the early part of the previous century to work in the mines. He remembered attempts at conversations with the Polish survivors at Hillersleben, how he could pick up word and phrases, and he remembered child survivor Micha Tomkiewicz’s Polish mother distinctly, an educated woman who also had medical knowledge and training. He remembered Gina Rappaport, a survivor from the Krakow Ghetto who spoke seven languages and translated for the people on the train. And he was so sorry to have missed the reunions (11 in all) in the past, but I did not even know about him until he called my classroom in October 2011, shortly after our Sept. 2011 final school reunion.

We were in Scranton for a film shoot-re-introducing him to survivor Judah Samet of Pittsburgh, who came with his daughter for a meeting and lunch with Walter and his family. Walter cried.

As it happened, I was scheduled to give a talk in New Jersey the next week. Walter and his son-in-law Ken made the trip, and when a New York based train survivor learned about it, he and his family came to meet Walter in another emotional meeting. More tears were shed, and students got to witness it.

As he recalled,

“After 70 years, I still get emotional. I try to control my emotions, but it’s impossible. I know I keep repeating the word, ‘helpless.’ It’s a good way to describe this situation, really. Yet as medics we did everything humanly possible to help; I would say without a question we saved a lot of lives. We really did save a lot of lives. When you hear them saying ‘heroes,’ we medics weren’t considered heroes, but I guess we were the unsung heroes. It’s a long time ago, over 70 years. It’s a lifetime. Sadly, in time, your memories become dimmed—but there are certain events that will stay with a person all of their lifetime.

 The whole experience [of being reunited with survivors over 70 years later] has made me feel ten feet tall, and I have to use the word ‘mind-boggling’—I guess you’d have to put it in the category of a dream… all the survivors keep saying is, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’”

Walter signed off on one of his letters to me.

Some of the boys couldn’t take this type of duty and had to be sent back to our headquarters… My parents never knew of Hillersleben; the 95th held more than 40 reunions and barely a word was mentioned concerning Hillersleben.

Matt, I wish you well in all your endeavors. God’s blessings to you and yours.

 

As ever,

Walter (Babe) Gantz

Member, 95th Medical Bn.

 

I think the best way to serve your memory, Walter, is to keep on keeping on in our ongoing endeavor, that you and your deeds are never forgotten, and generations of people will know and celebrate the goodness in humanity in recalling your life and the lives of all the soldiers and liberators through the book A Train Near Magdeburg, and our upcoming film of the same name. God bless YOU, my friend, and Godspeed.

Walter (Babe) Gantz Obituary

Walter (Babe) Gantz, 95, South Scranton, died peacefully Wednesday morning at Geisinger Community Medical Center surrounded by his family. His wife of 69 years, Charlotte Jean Kester Gantz, died in 2018.

Son of the late Frank and Rose Slangan Gantz, he spent his entire life in the South Side area. A graduate of Central High School and Keystone Junior College, he was a member of St. Stanislaus Polish National Catholic Cathedral.

During World War II, he served as a surgical technician with the 95th Medical Battalion. He was the recipient of the Combat Medical Badge, Bronze Star, Joint Service Commendation Medal, Army Commendation Medal, Meritorious Unit Citation and many other awards. He served in northern France, Rhineland, central Europe and Ardennes campaigns. During the Korean War, he was a member of the 79th Infantry Division.

In early 1944, he volunteered on a secret mission in the wetlands of southern Florida. It was a joint effort involving American, British, Canadian and French Armed Forces. Their task was to test clothing to be used in the event of chemical warfare. He was seriously burned by nitrogen mustard gas and was hospitalized at MacDill Air Force Base. His group was placed under 24-hour guard.

One of the greatest satisfactions of his lifetime was to reunite with the boys from his medical battalion after being separated for 18 years. He always referred to it as a “labor of love.” The first three reunions were held in Scranton and the 50th anniversary was also held locally. He remained as the only president of its association.

He was a great sports enthusiast throughout his lifetime, both as a player and coach. He was a member of the YMS of R team in the first-class Scranton association, the top amateur league. He also played with some of the best softball teams in the area. In 1945, while waiting to be transferred to the Pacific, his battalion’s softball team won the championship at the Arles staging area with a record of 35 wins and five losses. The staging area, located in northern France, consisted of more than 250,000 troops. In 1960, he formed the first slow-pitch league in NEPA. An outstanding distance runner, he continued to do so in his middle 70s. He was considered one of the top speed skaters in the area. While in the service, he was an assistant coach and member of the battalion boxing team. While in his 80s, Babe was a team adviser to the women’s softball team at Baptist Bible College. He continued in this role well into his 90s. He derived great satisfaction in hearing the players refer to him as Coach Walt. Most of the young generation referred to him as the “Old Coach.”

Babe was involved in community affairs throughout his lifetime. He was elected to a six-year term on the Scranton School Board in the 1970s. As the overseer of athletics, he was successful in introducing cross county in the district. He was noted for his objectivity while on the board. In the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic became known, he was a member of the initial committee to study its local impact.

As an AIDS instructor, he spoke at many of our high schools and colleges. Babe also served on the hemodialysis commission. As a combat medic, it was an easy decision for him to join our blood program in 1948. He served at the head of every volunteer office at the Scranton Chapter blood program and was its first representative to the NEPA Blood Center. He was the sole remaining member of the initial committee that organized the South Scranton Ecumenical Blood Council. The group collected more than 17,000 units of blood. Leading by example, he donated 27 gallons locally. In 2015, he retired from the program after 65 years. As the Americanism chairman for the American Legion Central District, he attended many services for those who made the supreme sacrifice during the Vietnam War.

Babe was an ardent believer in physical fitness. He would say to both young and old, “Keep those legs moving.”

Babe had a perpetual smile and when greeting you by your first name, he would always follow it with “God bless you.” It was easy for him to find the good in everyone. A spiritual individual, he tried his best to walk in the path of God.

He always said that he was truly blessed that he rubbed shoulders with so many individuals. In many instances he played the role of mentor, conveying any words of wisdom that he possessed.

He enjoyed music and said it was a source of strength during difficult times. His favorites were bluegrass, hymns, big band and the classics. In the evening, he spent many hours reading in his den. His topics ranged from Abraham Lincoln, World War II and those of a spiritual nature. For many years, he and Jeanie were seen at the area polka dances. Also for many years, the family enjoyed walking around Lake Scranton. He was an ardent fisherman and spent much time at his favorite pond, saying it was a great way to relax.

One of the most memorable events in his later years was having the honor and pleasure of meeting many Holocaust survivors at the Teen Symposium sponsored by the Holocaust Education Resource Center. For a number of years, he related his experience treating survivors from the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. His medical battalion set up a hospital to meet their needs. They were victims of what was known as “The Death Train at Magdeburg.”

In 2010, Babe was the recipient of the Hero of Combat, Hero of Compassion award by our local group for his humane endeavors. He is also portrayed in the book called “A Train Near Magdeburg,” written by Matt Rozell, and will be featured in the upcoming documentary by the same name.

Although he was very devoted to his family, he credits his wife, Jeanie, for faithfully providing the everyday needs of their children while he was away or on assignment.

Surviving are three daughters, Debbie Gantz, Lake Winola; Linda Guarino and husband, James, Blakely; and Doreen Klinkel and husband, Kenneth, Dalton; grandson, Tony Guarino; great-grandson, Elijah Guarino; nieces and nephews; and a sister-in-law, Shirley Angelis, Lake Ariel.

He was preceded in death by a brother, Frank Gantz, and two infant brothers, Steven and Walter Gantz.

The funeral will be Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. from the Leon S. Gorgol Funeral Home, 1131 Pittston Ave., with Mass at 10 in St. Stanislaus Polish National Catholic Cathedral. Interment with military honors will be at Abington Hills Cemetery.

Published in Scranton Times on Dec. 1, 2019

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Denial.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on November 16, 2016| 4 Comments »

“The Holocaust is one of the most well-documented events in human history. And yet some people, driven by hate and antisemitism, try to deny it today.” -UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

 

denial

ONE STAR! “Another great work from the Holocaust Factory run by zionist [sic] media. Any truth finder should read Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth & Reality as the beginning step to enlighten themselves!”

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The reviews for the new book are slowly coming in, and above is but one example. It was not unexpected. In fact, the first response I got after the book hit the market was an email at my school from a Holocaust denier, offering me a free book to ‘educate me’. That was very nice.

The fact that they call our American soldier–eyewitnesses liars just blows my mind. Below is the part of the chapter I wrote near the end on my experience with Holocaust deniers.

You can get A Train Near Magdeburg here and decide for yourself. If you read the book, please consider helping me promote the real story, and helping others, with your own review here.

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It comes with the territory.

You’re an emotion [sic] and propaganda-susceptible gullible fool.

You’re ‘teaching history’ and not going into the fraudulently alleged homicidal gas chambers? Or do you subconsciously already know it’s bullshit?

There were NO fake shower rooms disguised as gas chambers. That’s a racist anti-German blood libel. Shame on you. The Bath and Disinfection 1 facility was just that!

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There were no ‘gas chambers’ other than delousing facilities to keep the prisoners healthy. Allied bombing causes [sic] disease and starvation because the camps could no longer be supplied by Germany.

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The ‘6 million’ number is a HUGE exaggeration. Jews use the holocaust [sic] to garner sympathy and provide cover for their war crimes against the Palestinians. We studied this in college.

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It comes with the territory, I suppose, that if you are passionate about teaching the Holocaust and attract high profile attention, the trolls will begin their attempts to worm their way into the narrative. It began immediately after the very first reunion in 2007. I had received hundreds of emails from all over the world in support of my project, but I also got my first taste of this aberrant phenomenon known as Holocaust denial. Three emails, out of over three hundred, spewed forth their hate, with one containing in the subject line: ‘SIX MILLION LIVES=SIX MILLION LIES’.

My knee-jerk reaction was to delete them. But in the years that followed, as my blog built a following, more detailed attacks began; I began to archive them to create lessons for my students on Holocaust denial. One man, or woman—a hallmark of online Holocaust deniers is to hide behind false identities—even built a fictitious ‘news’ website attacking the first reunion, at a URL beginning with ‘blockyourid.com’:

‘Tank Commander Saves Fellow Jews From Gas Chambers’

Who Actually Believes This Garbage?

Izzie Gross, a tank commander, whose Sherman tank faced down a ‘Death Train’, shows up at a local high school with three survivors. Oddly the dates are off, the camps were liberated four months earlier, but who are we to doubt?

Maybe the Nazis were going to break through the Russia[sic] lines, crash in Auschwitz, and gas these poor survivors?

The denier posted false photographs of the liberators and me, claiming that we were all Jewish co-conspirators, when the opposite was true. My students were horrified, though they got a kick out of the photograph of me, which obviously was not me. The website was so bad that it did have a comical element; even commenters in a notorious white supremacist chatroom wondered if the author ‘JudicialInc’ was losing his touch.

Holocaust denial began with the perpetrators, their euphemisms, their secret orders, and their penchant for destroying and trying to hide evidence of their crimes. Even with the film footage of the liberators, or Eisenhower’s admonition to future generations, and the importance of the evidence and testimony presented at the postwar trials, Holocaust denial increases as time passes. And let’s not forget state sponsorship of Holocaust denial in certain quarters of the world.

I remember well one student’s incredulous question, after witnessing survivor testimony, directed at the survivor who had just described his experience. The survivor replied, ‘You see, it is easy for people to deny the Holocaust, because no one can truly grasp its magnitude and scope.’ ‘Unbelievable’ is a word used by liberator and survivor alike. And it will take effort to not allow the memory of the original eyewitnesses to vanish in the rearview mirror of history.

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‘The Dangers of Denial’

If one can deny one of the most well-documented events in human history, what else can one get away with ignoring? Or supporting?

History has proven that when one group is targeted, all people become more vulnerable. In other words, a society that tolerates antisemitism becomes susceptible to other forms of racism, hatred, and oppression. And we are unfortunately facing a world of rising antisemitism.

The internet makes it easier than ever for all sorts of information — and misinformation — to spread freely. So it’s more important than ever to stand up to hate and spread the truth. -UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

Below is a recent short educational video, produced by the USHMM. Note the photo at the 36 second mark. You know where you saw it first.

Even the Nazis Admitted to the Holocaust

[USHMM video]  [learn more]

‘Hate has power, but the TRUTH has more.’

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June 22, 1941-A turning point.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 20, 2016|

75 years ago, on June 22, 1941, the largest invasion in history got underway. The United States of America was not even in the war yet. Three million men in three major German army groups got underway, followed closely behind by mobile killing units. Twenty-seven million Soviet people would be killed in World War II, leaving in the former Soviet Union a huge collective void that certainly shaped the rest of the 20th century and beyond. It also marked a turning point in the history of the greatest crime in the history of the world.What is relatively unknown by many who think they know about the Holocaust, is that the Holocaust took an especially dark turn, in a Europe consumed in darkness. Due to the poor infrastructure, Jewish victims could not be shipped en masse to centralized murder centers like Auschwitz. Nor were the mass murder camps fully functional at this stage. Rather, it fell to the murderers to kill men, women and children in their own hometowns and villages, in ditches, witnessed by their neighbors. The bodies would be covered over and the killerss would move on to the next town. More than two million people would be murdered at very close range by the Einsatzgruppen, these mobile German execution squads.

Last October, an important story aired on Oct. 4th on CBS 60 Minutes. I’ve known about Father Dubois for quite some time; his book,  The Holocaust by Bullets, can be ordered here. I’m glad that his work is having such an impact, and being recognized as groundbreaking. Remember, we are only 75 years after the events… As I am at work on my own book about the Holocaust, I find myself admiring a kindred spirit, in the sense that I’m not Jewish, but Catholic like him. Maybe that is hardly relevant, except to call attention to what happened from the perspective of a non-Jew. For deniers, it won’t make a difference-but as we study, and interview, we become witnesses, too.

And that is why the work  is so important. You can click on the map at the bottom and then click on just one of the red dots to see what I mean. You will find out what happened in that small village or town, and even meet the people who saw the horror unfold. And you can spend a day on this page, easily.

His team can’t mark the mass graves that they find-they will be looted- and sadly I already knew what to expect when I reached the comments section of the article on the CBS News web page. And I am told that Father Dubois has received death threats at his residence in Paris.

So think about that, too.

hidden holocaust

“The Holocaust is marked and memorialized at places like Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Dachau. But nearly half of the six million Jewish victims were executed in fields and forests and ravines, places that were not named and remain mostly unmarked today. They were slaughtered in mass shootings and buried in mass graves in the former Soviet Union, where until very recently, little had been done to find them.

Our story is about a man who’s brought these crimes of the Holocaust to light. He is not a historian, or a detective or a Jew. He’s a French Catholic priest named Father Patrick Desbois. And for the past 13 years, he has been tracking down the sites where many of the victims lie and searching for witnesses who are still alive; many of whom had never been asked before to describe the horrors they had seen more than 70 years ago.”

Lara Logan: So what you’re learning here is completely unrecorded?

Father Desbois: Yeah, if we didn’t come, we’ll never know they killed Jews. These Jews would have never been counted as dead, never known, and the mass grave is totally unknown.

Gheorghe brought us down this road where, he said, all the Jewish families from the village were taken. He told us the day of the shooting he was tending to cows nearby. Now 70 years later, we watched as he traced the victims steps to the edge of the ravine. 

yahadmap

See the full report, here.   http://www.yahadinunum.org/

Read the transcript and view the report: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hidden-holocaust-60-minutes/

 

Related article: Voices of ghosts: Remembering the Holocaust’s mass killings
‘I have lived with the Holocaust my entire life — and I still don’t understand how this could have happened’

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To those whom we call, ‘our angels of life’.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 13, 2016| 1 Comment »

A survivor writes to his fellow survivors today, on the anniversary of their liberation. An excerpt:

For the 13th of April 2016.
Hello again to all of you ‘my twins’ on our 71st birthday.
I hope my good wishes find all of you in good health, both physical and mental.
It is a blessing to be alive and being able to think back of that ‘special birthday’ of ours.
To think about those who fought to give back our lives, whom we call ‘our angels of life’.
Like the years before; there are no words enough to express our thanks for them.

 

[My new book on this will be out this July. You can put in a pre-order notice, above- GET THE BOOK HERE]

30th Infantry Division Veterans of World War II, Nashville Tennessee, April 2015, 70th anniversary of the end of WWII. Credit: Larry S Powell.

30th Infantry Division Veterans of World War II, Nashville Tennessee, April 2015, 70th anniversary of the end of WWII. Credit: Larry S Powell.

Here also is an anniversary poem.

The poet Yaakov Barzilai was on the ‘Train Near Magdeburg’. Originally composed in Hebrew, a  translation has been provided by fellow survivor Micha Tomkiewicz. He has agreed to share his poem on the 70th anniversary of the liberation. ’11:55′  refers to the author’s recollection of the time of the day of the liberation of the train transport; ‘five minutes before the bitter end’.

Dedicated to Frank Towers and 30th Infantry Division soldiers, US liberators of the death train from Bergen-Belsen on April 13, 1945

 

At Eleven fifty-five.

Return to the Place of Liberation, April 13, 1945                                                                                 

The train stopped under the hill, huffing and puffing, as though it reached the end of the road.

An old locomotive pulling deteriorating train cars that became obsolete long ago, not even fit for carrying horses.

To an approaching visitor, the experience was of a factory of awful smell – really stinking.

Two thousand four hundred stinking cattle heading for slaughter were shoved to the train cars.

The butterflies into the surrounding air were blinded by the poisonous stench.

The train moved for five days back and forth between Bergen-Belsen and nowhere.

On the sixth day, a new morning came to shine over our heads.

Suddenly the heavy car doors were opened.

Living and dead overflowed into the surrounding green meadow.

Was it a dream or a delayed awakening of God?

When we identified the symbols of the American army, we ran to the top of the hill as though bitten by an army of scorpions, to kiss the treads of the tanks and to hug the soldiers with overflowing love.

Somebody cried: “Don’t believe it, it is a dream”. When we pinched ourselves; we felt the pain – it was real.

Mama climbed to the top of the hill. She stood in the middle of the field of flowers and prayed an almost a silent prayer from the heart.

Only few words escaped to the blowing wind:

‘Soon…Now

From the chimneys of death, I gave new life, to my children….

And this day-my grandchildren were born,  to a good life.

Amen and Amen’.

-Yaakov Barzilai.

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בְּאַחַת עֶשְׂרֵה חֲמִשִּׁים וְחָמֵשׁ 

שִׁיבָה לִמְקוֹם הַשִּׁחְרוּר בִּ 13 בְּאַפְּרִיל 1945

                     כַּעֲבֹר 65 שָׁנָה

הָרַכֶּבֶת עָצְרָה מִתַּחַת לַגִּבְעָה

נוֹשֶׁפֶת וְנוֹהֶמֶת

כְּמִי שֶׁהִגִּיעַ לְסוֹף דַּרְכּוֹ

קַטָּר זָקֵן גָּרַר קְרוֹנוֹת יְשָׁנִים

שֶׁאָבַד עֲלֵיהֶם כֶּלַח,

לֹא רְאוּיִים אֲפִלּוּ לִמְגוּרֵי סוּסִים.

מִי שֶׁהִזְדַּמֵּן לַסְּבִיבָה

הֶאֱמִין שֶׁנִּקְלַע לְבֵית חֲרֹשֶׁת לְסֵרָחוֹן

אַלְפַּיִם אַרְבַּע מֵאוֹת רָאשֵׁי בָּקָר מַסְרִיחִים

שֶׁנּוֹעֲדוּ לִשְׁחִיטָה

נִדְחְסוּ לַקְּרוֹנוֹת

כָּל הַפַּרְפַּרִים בַּסְּבִיבָה הִתְעַוְרוּ

מִסֵּרָחוֹן מַדְמִיעַ.

חֲמִשָּׁה יָמִים נָסְעָה הָרַכֶּבֶת הָלוֹךְ וַחֲזֹר

בֵּין בֶּרְגֶן-בֶּלְזֶן לְשׁוּם מָקוֹם

בַּיּוֹם הַשִּׁשִּׁי, בֹּקֶר חָדָשׁ זָרַח מֵעָלֵינוּ.

בְּבַת אַחַת נִפְתְחוּ הַדְּלָתוֹת הַכְּבֵדוֹת שֶׁל הַקְּרוֹנוֹת

חַיִּים וּמֵתִים נִשְׁפְּכוּ בְּיַחַד

אֶל הַיָּרֹק הַמִּשְׁתּוֹלֵל בַּשָּׂדוֹת.

הַאִם הָיָה זֶה חֲלוֹם

אוֹ הַצָּתָה מְאֻחֶרֶת שֶׁל אֱלֹהִים?

כְּשֶׁזִּהִינוּ אֶת סֵמֶל הַצָּבָא הַאָמֶרִיקָאִי,

כִּנְשׁוּכֵי עַקְרָב שָׁעֲטְנוּ בְּמַעֲלֵה הַגִּבְעָה

לְנַשֵּׁק אֶת שַׁרְשְׁרָאוֹת הַטַּנְקִים

וְלַחֲנֹק אֶת הַחַיָּלִים מֵרֹב אַהֲבָה.

מִישֶׁהוּ צָעַק: “אַל תַּאֲמִינוּ זֶה רַק חֲלוֹם”

וּכְשֶׁצָּבַטְנוּ אֶת עָצַמְנוּ

כָּאָב לָנוּ בֶּאֱמֶת.

גַּם אִמָּא טִפְּסָה אֶל גִּבְעַת הַנִּצָּחוֹן

הִיא עָמְדָה בְּתוֹךְ שָׂדֶה שֶׁל פְּרָחִים וְהִתְפַּלְּלָה

מִתּוֹךְ הַתְּפִלָּה הַחֲרִישִׁית שֶׁנֶּאֶמְרָה בַּלֵּב

רַק מִלִּים בּוֹדְדוֹת הִסְתַנְנוּ אֶל אֲוִיר הָעוֹלָם:

” וְכָאן… וְעַכְשָׁו… עַל פַּסֵי הָרַכֶּבֶת…

קָרוֹב… לַאֲרֻבּוֹת הַמָּוֶת…נָתַתִּי…

חַיִּים חֲדָשִׁים…לִילָדַי… וְהַיּוֹם הַזֶּה…

נוֹלְדוּ גַּם נְכָדַי… לְחַיִּים טוֹבִים…

אָמֵן… וְאָמֵן…                                                                     יעקב ברזילי

‘Yaakov Barzilai is an esteemed Israeli poet; he is also a survivor of The Shoah. Born in Hungary in 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany he shares, in poetry and prose, a child’s memories of the horrors that befell the Jewish people. He tells of acts of great humanity and others of exceptional, he recounts tales of transportation and eventual rescue. He speaks of losses – family, potential and describes the eventual triumph of man over inhumanity.’ [www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=8756081]

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Hell on Earth.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 20, 2016|

I just finished the first draft of Chapter One of my new book. It took several weeks but in my head I have been writing it for years.

The chapter is called ‘Hell on Earth’. It’s Bergen Belsen in the spring of 1945. If you don’t know a lot about the concentration camp system, this 40 plus page chapter will tell you, but for now it is where Anne Frank, her sister, and 70,000 others were murdered.

The chapter has been a ton of research and I think kind of draining, but you get through it. In order to show the tremendous highs, you kind of have to go and plumb the depths. Hard to get much lower than this. And for you teachers out there, remember to be judicious with the graphic imagery in the classroom. Answer the question first- why am I teaching this? It should be more than a cheap gimmick to grab a kid’s attention. In the chapter, I chose to use some troublesome material. Not for shock value, but to better serve humanity, in context–but I am not publishing that here right now because that context is missing.

DSCN3857.2

Some of my research material. Books presented to me by my friends at the 2009 reunion; the 20th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Bergen Belsen book, and Volume 1 of the Book of Names, an attempt to compile the list of all those who suffered here.

I learned a lot. Sometimes you wonder how much you take for granted. And that is probably one of the main points of my book.

This excerpt from an eleven year old girl.

At the end of November it was very cold in Europe. Finally I was given some rags and one black ladies shoe with a high heel and one red girl’s shoe. Imagine the agony of a young girl having to walk unevenly like that for half a year.

In those shoes I marched into Bergen Belsen concentration camp on December 2nd, 1944. In those shoes my legs froze while I was enduring roll calls, which lasted between two to five hours.

When the mounds of dead bodies started to pile up nearby in a frightening manner, we, the children, made bets between us, as to who would die tomorrow and who would die the day after. Every one of them had his signs. I had become an old woman already, eleven and half years old.

During the breaks between roll calls, if it wasn’t too cold, I would stand by the fence and look at the naked dead bodies with their gaping mouths. I used to wonder what it was that they still wanted to shout out loud and couldn’t. I tried to determine who were men, and who were women. But they were only skin and bones. I tried to imagine how I could dress these dead bodies in clothes for dinner; their pale skin color did not always match the clothes.

Another eleven year old girl:

When told to prepare ourselves for the departure in the train I was already very weak and sick. Two weeks prior I had a very high fever. I was in Bergen Belsen with my aunt, my father’s sister, as by then I had lost my entire family.

The Germans let us know that all those who could not walk would have to stay behind. My aunt wanted to stay because she knew that I was already very weak; however, I insisted on going. I said to my aunt, “You know that they kill the weak and the sick. We will go with the healthy people.” Although I was only 11½ years old, my aunt listened to me. I probably had a very strong will to live.

Before we left, they gave each of us a raw potato, and somehow we managed to bake them over a wood fire. My aunt then said to me, “You know that now is the Passover holiday”—we barely remembered what day of the week it was, let alone the date. On Passover, according to the story, our forefather Moses took us out of Egypt. Maybe G–d is bringing us to freedom, and maybe we will live?

A seventeen year old girl:

Saturday, ‎April 7th, ‎ ‎1945. Our transport is stranded at the Bergen–Celle railway station. Our irresponsible captors no longer provide us with food. After suffering from constant starvation for six long months at the death factory of Bergen Belsen, the German SS leaves us now in total hunger and total thirst. We are too exhausted, dizzy and weak to grasp how grave our situation is.

What do the Nazis have in mind?

What do the Nazis have in mind, indeed. On to Chapter Two to find out. The book should be done this summer.

For updates, follow this blog. For advance notice, sign up at bit.ly/RozellNewBook.

 

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‘Our own boys used to go shooting people after school’.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 18, 2016|

 

Clara Rudnick around age 15.

Clara Rudnick around age 15.

I’m sharing a pair of articles that I think are illuminating on the state of affairs regarding the Holocaust in Lithuania. In previous posts I have told the story of my friend Clara Rudnick who somehow was able to survive where most all of her friends and family in Lithuania were murdered. She also bravely went back for a visit in 2013 with her son, and found that people did not know, or pretended not to know, what happened only a couple generations back.

New book prompts soul-searching in Lithuania about Holocaust-era complicity

Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Feb. 17, 2016

By Cnaan Liphshiz

As the author of a best-seller that deals with female sexuality after 50, the Lithuanian novelist Ruta Vanagaite is used to embarrassing questions from journalists about her private life.

But even she was astonished when a reporter for a popular television station demanded to see her birth certificate to ascertain the veracity of claims that she is Jewish.

The question came during an interview about Vanagaite’s latest book, “Musiskiai” (“Our People”), a travelogue about the Holocaust consisting of interviews with witnesses to the atrocities perpetrated by Lithuanians against their Jewish neighbors.

The book’s publication last month has triggered the first major public debate in Lithuania about local Lithuanians’ complicity in the genocide of the Jews. It currently tops the best-seller list of the Pegasas chain of bookstores and has prompted officials to promise to publish this year the names of 1,000 Holocaust perpetrators they have been keeping under wraps for years.

Vanagaite, who is 61 and not Jewish, visited killing fields in Lithuania and Belarus to research the book, which she co-authored with Efraim Zuroff, the renowned Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office. Though she found the journalist’s request to see her birth certificate unsettling, she complied anyway.

“I know where it’s coming from,” Vanagaite told JTA. “Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust is such a taboo that being a Jew or a Russian spy are the only explanations for wanting to talk about it.”

But that is beginning to change thanks to Vanagaite’s book.

“In one fell swoop, the book has brought a wave of truth telling about the Holocaust to the mainstream of society who follow the large media outlets,” said Dovid Katz, a Yiddish scholar in Vilnius who has campaigned for historical accuracy on the Lithuanians’ Holocaust-era role in the near annihilation of the Lithuanian Jewish community of 220,000. “It is of notable importance that a born and bred Lithuanian author tells the simple truth as it has never been told in a trade book not intended for scholars and specialists.”

Geoff Vasil, a spokesman for the Jewish Community of Lithuania, said “the turning of the tide within Lithuanian society” on this issue “now appears to be taking place like never before.”
The 304-page volume has prompted not just the official Jewish Community of Lithuania but also local media outlets to demand the government publish its list of suspected war criminals. The government received the names in 2012 from its own Genocide and Resistance Research Center but failed to publish them or issue any indictments. The center’s director now has promised to publish the names by 2017.

Vanagaite’s book also has highlighted the fact that despite ample evidence and testimonies of widespread complicity, not a single person has been imprisoned in Lithuania for killing Jews during the Holocaust.

“Germany, Austria, even Hungary and Poland have had this reckoning a decade ago, but there’s a strong resistance in Lithuanian society to follow suit and confront this stain in our history,” Vanagaite said. Yet failing to do so, she said, “will mean we will be branded as a whole nation of murderers, and rightly so, because we refuse to acknowledge and condemn a murderous fringe.”

Vanagaite experienced this reluctance personally last year when she made an unwelcome discovery that served as her motivation to write the book in the first place.

In researching the life story of her grandfather — a well-known activist against communist Russia’s occupation of Lithuania until 1991 — she found documents that showed he helped German authorities compile a list of 10 Jewish communists during World War II. The German authorities then gave him some Jews to work on his farm as slave laborers before they were murdered.

“It was devastating,” Vanagaite recalls. “This was a man who was a hero to me and my family.”

In Lithuania, locals who fought with the Germans against the Red Army are widely revered as patriotic freedom fighters — including Juozas Ambrazevicius, the leader of the Nazi collaborationist government. In a funeral organized by the central government, Ambrazevicius was reburied in 2012 with full national honors in the city of Kaunas. Four years earlier, Lithuanian prosecutors investigated for alleged war crimes four Jews who fought against the Nazis with the Russians. The investigation was dropped amid an international outcry.

Lithuania is the only country whose government officially branded Soviet occupation as a form of genocide. That “Soviet-sponsored genocide” is commemorated in Lithuania far more prominently than the Holocaust. And even any mention of the Jewish genocide had been absent from Vilnius’ state Museum of Genocide Victims until 2011.

“Exposing that some Lithuanians who are considered patriotic heroes are really war criminals would undermine the good-versus-evil narrative,” Katz noted.

It is precisely Vanagaite’s credentials as a good Lithuanian from a good Lithuanian family that has made her message so piercing to fellow Lithuanians, said Zuroff, the co-author of “Our People” and longtime critic of Lithuanian governments.

“My voice [about Lithuania] was loud in international media, but I was not getting heard inside Lithuania, where I was pretty much portrayed as an enemy of the people,” Zuroff told JTA. “It took someone like Ruta to achieve that.”

The second part of Vanagaite’s book is about her travels with Zuroff, where they spoke to octogenarians who witnessed mass executions. Referencing Zuroff – a reviled figure by many Lithuanians, including well-known cartoonists and nationalist columnists – Vanagaite titled that part of the book “Journey with an Enemy.”

But Vanagaite and Zuroff are not in full accord. She believes that in lieu of Lithuanian introspection, the extent and cruelty of Lithuanian complicity has been vastly exaggerated – including in survivors’ testimonies. She cast doubt on testimonies about a man who was boiled alive in Panevezys and an account that locals, after slaughtering dozens of Jews in Kaunas, sang the Lithuanian anthem. Zuroff says he has no reason to doubt these accounts.

“But these details are less significant in light of the movement that this book started,” he said.

Meanwhile, Vanagaite is experiencing the public denunciation that for years has been directed at Zuroff, Katz and other critics of Lithuania’s refusal to prosecute Holocaust perpetrators.

Cast as a Kremlin agent in some publications and as a closeted Jew in others, Vanagaite says some of her friends no longer wish to speak to her.

At a book fair next month, Vanagaite says she will hand out stones to visitors of her booth with the following instruction: “Any Lithuanian who’s certain that their family wasn’t involved in the Holocaust should throw one right at me.”

Source: http://www.jta.org/2016/02/17/news-opinion/world/new-book-prompts-soul-searching-in-lithuania-about-holocaust-era-complicity

Author explores Holocaust in Lithuania: ‘Our own boys used to go shooting people after school’

The Lithuania Tribune

Friday, January 29, 2016

Author Rūta Vanagaitė recently presented a book, “Our Own”, about the Holocaust in Lithuania. Although historians have been researching the topic for years, the Lithuanian society has yet to realize and acknowledge the part their compatriots, ordinary Lithuanians, played in the mass killings of Jews, Vanagaitė says.  It is a book dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the great Jewish massacre in 1941 when almost the entire Jewish community in Lithuania was killed. In total, about 200,000 Jews were killed in Lithuania between 1941-1944. There were 227 mass killings of Jews all over Lithuania. “I took this theme because I was struck by how feared it is in Lithuania. I wanted to understand what really happened in our country and to our people, and why it happened. This is not a historical book – this is a book for self-development. I know that Lithuania did not wait for this book. That is why I wrote it. It was the most important moment, when somebody had to write this book. Those witnesses are 85-90 years old, they will no longer be with us in a few years,” said Vanagaitė.

While writing the book, she researched archives and travelled to killing sites across Lithuania, together with the ‘Nazi hunter’ Efraim Zuroff, to talk to living witnesses. “They are now 85 or 90 years old. Over the last 75 years, no one came to ask them about [the Holocaust], so now they are afraid to talk,” Vanagaitė tells in an interview to the LRT TV programme Dėmesio Centre.

How would this explain the enthusiasm with which Lithuanians took part in massacring Jews during World War Two?

There wasn’t much enthusiasm, except for a few [who] were motivated by it. The rest were simply doing their work.

But it seems that your book is precisely about how willingly Lithuanians were killing Jews?

Those who took part in the killings for spoils were probably willing. Ordinary Lithuanians joined battalions because they were told that those battalions were the seeds of the army of independent Lithuania, that they would be going to fight against the soviets and defend Lithuania. At first, these battalions would be sent to guard buildings, later Jews, and after that they took the Jews to pits and lined them up. It took enormous willpower to say “I will not shoot.” But there were some who did not shoot Jews.

Would they get away with it?

Yes. Officers [overseeing the killings] were usually Lithuanians, Germans would not even go to massacre sites in the provinces. If a Lithuanian officer saw that your hands were shaking, how could he be sure you would not turn and shoot at him? If he saw you were nervous, on the edge, you would not even get a weapon. But there were some who wanted to shoot. Those with enthusiasm were the marginals. Meanwhile those who were joining the battalions were motivated by a sense of duty or something else. Some wanted money, others had no home, yet others loved their country and hated the Soviets. There were those who killed 20,000 people with their own hands over four years.

While researching for the book, you must have read everything written on the topic in Lithuanian?

I have. But my main sources were files [in archives] and conversations with people. An ordinary person would not go to archives and spend six months going through files. Or read all the books. So my goal was to put all information into 300 pages so people could grasp what really happened.

Why did you take up this subject?

I have done several other projects [on the Holocaust] before, I find the topic interesting, although I do not have any Jewish ancestry myself. There are few Jews left in Lithuania, only several thousand, but we continue to hate them. Moreover, there is great fear and reluctance to discuss the subject. People working in public institutions are particularly fearful. You give a new angle on the subject. What was your goal? I tried to take a closer look at people who killed, to understand them, to see how they started, what motivated them. We still don’t know what was happening by the pits. All we know is that thousands of Jews were killed and that it was the marginals who did it. But what do we know about the fact that they wouldn’t shoot children, but pound them against trees to save bullets? That there have been found a lot of children’s bodies with intact skulls? This means they were buried alive. Do we know about the incredible anti-Semitism that the Lithuanian government of the time fostered? It emboldened people, they would be told that Jews were lice, mites, communists and what have you. We can still hear people saying that Jews were communists. These are words of Hitler and Goebbels. You visited the killing sites.

Are there still many witnesses left?

Yes. There are people living near each killing site who remember well. They are now 85 or 90 years old. Over the last 75 years, no one came to ask them about it, so now they are afraid to talk. No one, except Romas from Šeduva, agreed to tell me their name or take a picture. They said they were afraid, that someone might come and kill them. Who will come, who will kill, I asked. Lithuanians, they said.

“Nazi hunter” Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center who attended the presentation of your book, said that the Lithuanian government was reluctant to do much about the Holocaust. What did he mean?

When the United States deported war criminals – Kazys Gimžauskas, Aleksandras Lileikis, Algimantas Dailidė – the process was stalled and not one criminal was sentenced. I am surprised by one more thing. I went to the government to enquire about a list of 2,055 names prepared by the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre; this list is gathering dust at the government’s chancellery since 2012. I asked if it were possible to take that list out, to give it to prosecutors. The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre worked three years compiling the list of 2,055 names and there are tens of thousands files left; the centre does not know what to do next. This is what I was told by the deputy chancellor: whatever we do, the Jews will never have enough.

In your book, you dethrone certain individuals and events in Lithuania’s anti-Soviet resistance. Like the June 1941 uprising, Lithuania’s provisional government, the white-bands (anti-Soviet volunteer squads).

The June uprising was started by a man named Norkus who hoisted a Lithuanian tricolour on the Resurrection Church in Kaunas. Later, he was one of the commanders of the Nation’s Defence battalion and, in early July, 3,000 innocent people were killed under his command. The white-bands were very expertly used by the Nazis. The Lithuanian government of the time set up the first concentration camp at the 7th Fort in Kaunas, where these Jews were murdered. The killings were directed by a man who, just days before, had raised a Lithuanian flag at a church. What is he? A hero?

You also write that even priests were rather lenient about such “sins”. For instance, a Catholic church in Minsk offered absolutions to Lithuanians who killed Jews in Belarus.

Each battalion had a chaplain who would hold service every Sunday. At times, the guys would go to the confessional five at a time. To make it faster, the sins were identical after all. Afterwards they’d sing the Lithuanian anthem.

What is it that you want people to take away from your book? The take-away is very simple. All this happened at the intersection of very many unfortunate circumstances. Thousands of young Lithuanians were pushed into this. I cannot blame them, nor can I justify them. If, under particular circumstances, it happened once, can we be sure it won’t happen again? How can we condemn the boys of Islamic State, if our own boys of 15-16 years used to go shooting people after school? This has happened and it can happen again.

We cannot close our eyes to truth, however painful and ugly it is.

Source: http://en.delfi.lt/lithuania/society/author-explores-holocaust-in-lithuania-our-own-boys-used-to-go-shooting-people-after-school.d?id=70250476

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“There is nothing there.”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 3, 2016|

Holocaust Survivor Clara Rudnick in her home, Photo Erica Miller 8/31/10

Holocaust Survivor Clara Rudnick in her home, Photo Erica Miller 8/31/10

I have a friend who lost her entire family and just barely survived the Holocaust in her homeland of Lithuania, and elsewhere.

I gave a talk a while back and Clara was there. Here is what I wrote then:

I gave my first talk last night after returning  from an intensive 3 week European study tour. Arriving early to prepare and set up, I looked up and in walked Siobhan, a former student, and her mom, followed a little while by an older woman I was surprised and delighted to see- Mrs. Rudnick, or Clara. She gave me a hug and took off her coat and told me that she had taken a cab to the site of the lecture, and, oh, could I please give her a ride home? I was delighted.

During the lecture I recognized her before the audience, and thanked her for coming out. She told the audience how proud she was to live in the “North Country” of upstate New York. Heck, she’s lived here since 1949, a dozen years before I was born! She was moved to tears, as was Siobhan, who gave her a hug.

During the talk, she nodded her head in agreement to many of my points. Afterwards, she pulled out a piece of paper, a short statement that she had written, explaining that she had been meaning to call me.  You see, she was not the only traveler to Europe this summer. While I was in Poland touring Holocaust related sites, Mrs. Rudnick had returned to Lithuania of her youth.

Not an easy thing, given that

a. Clara is 89 years old;

b. Clara is a Holocaust survivor;

c. Clara lost most of her family to the SS Einsatzgruppen and their Lithuanian collaborators.

She and her late husband Abe were two of only 7000 survivors of the 70,000 Jews of Vilna. I was familiar with a lot of the history, but to understand more of what she had gone through, I looked up the following at the USHMM website:

The Lithuanians carried out violent riots against the Jews both shortly before and immediately after the arrival of German forces. In June and July 1941, detachments of German Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), together with Lithuanian auxiliaries, began murdering the Jews of Lithuania. By the end of August 1941, most Jews in rural Lithuania had been shot. By November 1941, the Germans also massacred most of the Jews who had been concentrated in ghettos in the larger cities. The surviving 40,000 Jews were concentrated in the Vilna, Kovno, Siauliai, and Svencionys ghettos, and in various labor camps in Lithuania. Living conditions were miserable, with severe food shortages, outbreaks of disease, and overcrowding.

In 1943, the Germans destroyed the Vilna and Svencionys ghettos, and converted the Kovno and Siauliai ghettos into concentration camps. Some 15,000 Lithuanian Jews were deported to labor camps in Latvia and Estonia. About 5,000 Jews were deported to extermination camps in Poland, where they were murdered. Shortly before withdrawing from Lithuania in the fall of 1944, the Germans deported about 10,000 Jews from Kovno and Siauliai to concentration camps in Germany.

Soviet troops reoccupied Lithuania in the summer of 1944. In the previous three years, the Germans had murdered about 90 percent of Lithuanian Jews, one of the highest victim rates in Europe.

Clara was anxious to speak to me. She told me of her trip with her son. Together they returned to Svinsyan, where her parents, two sisters and two brothers lived. To one of my students, a few years back, she told the following story:

On June 21st, 1941, the Nazis came into my town, I lived with my mother and father, two brother and two sisters. In July 4th, they took my oldest brother and burned him alive, with 90 other Jewish teenagers in my town. In the early part of August they came in and took my twin brother, along with another 100 teenagers and dug a big hole and buried them alive. In September they took the whole town about 8,000 people and brought then to where we held our flea markets- this was both of my sisters and my mother- out into the woods where they lined them up and shot them and left them there. This is where my father and I escaped- he knew a lot of men- and we went to farm to farm and hid out until the Nazis would come, and we would leave because if they caught us they would kill us and the people we were staying with, because they were harboring  fugitives.

At the town’s museum, she stopped to ask where the memorial of the murder site, Poligon, could be found. Clara said that they  told her that they did not know where it was, though half the town’s population, many of the families having lived their since the 1300s, had been murdered there.

At the hotel in Vilna she inquired how she could get to Ponary, and was simply told “there is nothing there”. Google Ponary. 110000 relevant results. 70,000 Jews were shot to death there by the Germans and Lithuanians.

Taking the English-speaking bus tour of the Old City of Vilna, the guide described the Philharmonic Hall but did not tell the tourists that this was the entrance to the Vilna Ghetto, where she had been imprisoned until being deported to a slave labor camp and later to a concentration camp. When Clara asked why the guide did not mention this, the guide said that she “did not know.”

Maybe the guide was young and was not taught this history in school. Or maybe it was not important enough to be part of the official program. 90 to 95% of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. To one lady on the bus, and her son, it was important. In Clara’s words, “In just three days, I learned that Lithuania has not faced it history of the destruction of its 250,000 Jews”.

Clara is happy that I am keeping the memory alive. She put on her coat and climbed up into my pickup truck without assistance. She chatted all the way home as I tried to navigate to her house in the dark. She thanked me over and over. Not at all. Thank you for coming into my life and making me, and my students, a part of yours.

***

Here then, is some welcome news from Europe. But you have to wonder how far it will really go.

“Lithuania pledges to publish names of 1,000 suspected Holocaust perpetrators”

 

Following the publication in Lithuania of a groundbreaking book on local complicity during the Holocaust, a state museum on genocide said it would publish a list of 1,000 suspected perpetrators.

Terese Birute Burauskaite, who heads the Vilnius-based Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, said her institution would “this year try to publish a book” containing “over 1,000 Lithuanian residents who are connected to the Holocaust,” the news website Delfi.lt reported Tuesday.

Burauskaite made her remarks in an interview on the findings of a book titled “Musiskiai” (“Our Own”) that was released last week. Co-authored by the Israeli Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff and Ruta Vanagaite, a local author who began studying the Holocaust after discovering that members of her own family played a role in the murder of Jews during the genocide, the book focused media attention on the controversial issue of local complicity.

In 2012, the museum gave the government a list containing 2,055 names of supposed perpetrators, Vanagaite said in the Delfi interview last week about her book, but Vilnius neither published it nor made any attempt to investigate the people concerned.

Rimantas Vaitkus, a deputy minister for education, told Delfi: “We do not have such a list,” explaining that compiling one was up to the genocide center. But Burauskaite, the center’s director, said her organization had discussed the list with the government. After studying the list for three years, she said her organization eliminated approximately 1,000 suspects.

According to Zuroff, the list was published in 2012 briefly on the website of the museum but taken offline after 24 hours.

The book by Zuroff, who is the Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Vanagaite chronicles their journeys last summer across Lithuania, where they spoke with people who witnessed locals killing Jews. Its 2,500 copies were sold out within two days of its Jan. 26 publication release.

More than 95 percent of the 220,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania during the Holocaust were murdered, many of them by local Nazis and Nazi collaborators. Some of the perpetrators are celebrated as heroes in Lithuania, where many perceive them as national heroes for their opposition to Russian domination of the country.

“There has been a stubborn reluctance in Lithuania to start the retrospection that went on elsewhere in Europe,” Zuroff said. “There are signs this book is changing that.”

http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Lithuania-pledges-to-publish-names-of-1000-suspected-Holocaust-perpetrators-443624

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