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She Was Told to Live and Tell the Story.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 19, 2026| Leave a Comment »

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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A Soldier Witnesses: “I’ll Be in a Better Frame of Mind Tomorrow…”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 17, 2026| Leave a Comment »

“I’ll Be in a Better Frame of Mind Tomorrow.”

April 17, 2026

Eighty-one years ago today, a young man sat down somewhere in central Germany and wrote a letter to his minister back home in Dayton, Ohio.

He had not written in months. He apologized for that. And then he described something that had happened four days earlier — something so shattering that he could not bring himself to write his mother about it, not yet, not that night.

“Today I saw a sight that’s impossible to describe, however I’ll try.”

He tried. And the letter that emerged from First Lieutenant Charles M. “Chuck” Kincaid — spare, honest, written in the plain language of a young man still working out what he had just witnessed — has become one of the most remarkable documents in the entire archive of the Train Near Magdeburg story. I want to share it again today, on its 81st anniversary. But this time, thanks to Chuck’s daughter Judi and her husband Mark, I can finally introduce you more fully to the man behind it. And what a man he was.

Chuck was born on June 20, 1918, in Dayton, Ohio. His father ran a garage and body shop, and as a boy Chuck made himself useful hanging around the mechanics, handing out wrenches, learning how things worked. When Chuck was about ten, his father expanded and took on the Essex car dealership to challenge Ford and Chevy. Three years later, the Great Depression arrived and the business went bankrupt.

And then — though Chuck would never speak of it, not once, not to his own children — something harder than the Depression happened that effected the whole family. His father left. And so Chuck, at twelve years old, became the man of the family.

Somehow his mother kept the house. She turned one of the bedrooms into a rental, taking in two college students from the University of Dayton at ten dollars a week — she made their breakfast and did their laundry. And Chuck, by age ten, had already gotten himself a paper route. By the time he was in junior high he had a morning route and an evening route. He tells it matter-of-factly in the brief autobiography he wrote in 1986: “I can remember at one point, around 1933, that the $3 to $4 that I earned weekly put food on the table.”

He graduated from high school in 1936, in the upper ten percent of his class, and got a job at National Cash Register for ten dollars a week. When that slumped, he found work at Standard Register, and saved over four hundred dollars in two years — which he describes, with characteristic understatement, as “no mean trick those days.” He enrolled at the University of Cincinnati in the fall of 1938 in an engineering co-op program. He worked jobs in between semesters to pay for the next — at a factory, at a restaurant, at a plating control plant making 35 cents an hour. When the co-op program fell apart as the country converted to wartime production and U of C raised tuition to $650 a year, he transferred to Ohio State, where the tuition was twenty dollars a quarter. He took ROTC because it paid twenty dollars a month and supplied a uniform — and he needed the uniform.

He entered the Army from OSU at the age of twenty-five. He was an older soldier. He had earned everything the hard way, one semester at a time, since the age of twelve.

By April 1945, Chuck had fought from Normandy across Europe with the 30th Infantry Division. He was no stranger to danger — he had earned an Air Medal at the Battle of Mortain the previous August by doing something extraordinary: climbing into a small Piper L-4 observation plane and flying it over four attacking Panzer divisions to call in artillery adjustments. He earned a Bronze Star at St. Lô. He was, by any measure, a brave and capable young officer. And he had seen things no human being should have to see:

On April 17, 1945, Chuck Kincaid came upon the train.

That evening, he wrote to his minister:

Not one of them, Chuck wrote, could walk a mile and survive. The army improvised what it could: watered-down C-rations served as soup, force used to keep people in line because they had, as Chuck put it, “no will power left, only the characteristics of beasts.” He believed that a few weeks of decent food would restore them to something resembling human dignity. He was right. But he also understood, with a clarity that comes through even in his plain soldier’s prose, that the scars on their minds would last the rest of their lives.

Chuck wrote: “No other single thing had convinced me as this experience has that Germany isn’t fit to survive as a nation. I’ll never forget today.”

He meant it. He had earned the right to mean it. But history, which rarely moves in straight lines, had something else in mind — something Chuck Kincaid could not possibly have foreseen from that ravine in April 1945. Today, it is young Germans, three kilometers from where he stood, who have become among the most devoted keepers of this memory. Johanna Mücke, who first wrote to me as a sixteen-year-old in 2018, went on to correspond with combat medic Walter Gantz in the last year of his life, and on the 75th anniversary of the liberation — alone, during a pandemic that had cancelled the planned ceremony — walked to the site at Farsleben and placed flowers on the bare concrete foundation of the unfinished monument. Her teacher, Karin Petersen, and community members like Daniel Keweloh have continued to build and sustain that memorial presence, ensuring that what Chuck witnessed is permanently marked in the landscape where it happened. What fanaticism and fascism had done to ordinary human beings — the devastation Chuck could barely find words for — these young people have chosen to carry forward not as shame to be hidden, but as a responsibility to be honored. Chuck couldn’t have imagined it. I find, whenever I think about it, that I am still moved by it.

And then, with a gentleness that reveals everything about who he was:

“I was going to write Mother tonight but thought better of it. I’ll be in a better frame of mind tomorrow.”

He protected her. After everything she had given — keeping the house, taking in the boarders, feeding her children through the Depression while her husband was gone — he didn’t want to add to her burden. He’d write something better for her when he could find the words for that, too.

I never met Chuck Kincaid. He had passed before I found his letter, which came to me in March of 2009, brought by his son-in-law Mark, who had connected that old family document — transcribed by Chuck’s sister Helen and passed around in copies — to the photographs of the liberation on our school website. I have since had the privilege of meeting Judi and Mark, and learning more about the man her father became after the war. He went to work for the American Can Company and spent thirty-five years there, much of that time with Anheuser-Busch improving the beer can and its handling equipment. His name is on the patent for the aluminum pop-top can that most of us have been opening our entire lives without ever thinking about who made it possible. He was, as Judi says simply, “a very brilliant man.” But also a man who had been the man of his family since age twelve, who worked his way through college a semester at a time, who flew over four Panzer divisions in a tiny observation plane, who stood beside a train in a German ravine and watered down C-rations for people who had been reduced to something barely alive, and who wrote to his minister about it because he didn’t want to upset his mother.

That is who these men were. That is the America that showed up at Farsleben on April 13, 1945.

Since I first shared Chuck’s letter on this blog, the story has continued to unfold in ways I could not have imagined. The young people of Wolmirstedt, Germany — a half-hour walk from where Chuck stood that April morning — have taken up this history with a commitment that moves me deeply every time I think of it, and the tenacious Ron Chaulet working from the Netherlands, alongside so many dedicated community members, have continued to build and sustain the memorial presence at the liberation site — ensuring that what Chuck Kincaid witnessed is permanently marked in the landscape where it happened.

And then there is the film footage.

In July 2023, US Army Signal Corps footage of the train at Farsleben — filmed on April 14, 1945, just around the time Chuck’s letter was written — surfaced from the National Archives after 78 years. A German museum associate in Wolmirstedt noticed just a few seconds of it in a documentary and wondered to me if it was our train. Our film team made the inquiry to the National Archives and within weeks the full reel arrived. James Bulgin, head of public history at the Imperial War Museum in London, told us that when he first saw it he stared in silence and played it over and over. He had known this story for years through photographs — but the film restored what photographs can never quite give: motion, life, the physical reality of those people in that ravine on that April morning. Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, who helped build the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has described the arrival of the American soldiers as occurring at “11:59 and 59 seconds” in the lives of the prisoners. The film shows you what that means.

And in it, you can see the words chalked on the side of car number 16: THREE CHEERS FOR AMERICA. VIVE LES U.S.A.

Someone on that train wrote those words. Someone found a piece of chalk in the hours after liberation — and soon after Chuck was composing his thoughts to his minister — and scratched their gratitude onto the side of the shabby train car that had carried them to the edge of death. They had no idea anyone would see it 78 years later. Neither did Chuck, when he put pen to paper.

The letters we write, not knowing who will one day find them. The words chalked on a train car, not knowing they will be seen by the world. The boy who became the man of the family at twelve, who flew over Panzer divisions at twenty-five, who could not find adequate words for his mother but managed to find them for his minister — all of it now part of a story that refuses to end.

I am so grateful to Judi and Mark for trusting us with Chuck’s autobiography, and with the parts of his story that he himself, with characteristic modesty, left out.

soldier chuck kincaid in the netherlands with two Dutch children, likely 1944

He said he’d be in a better frame of mind tomorrow.

I think he was. I think he always was.

— Matthew Rozell, April 17, 2026

The full text of Chuck Kincaid’s letter is posted here. The US Army Signal Corps footage of the train liberation, recovered from the National Archives in July 2023, is viewable at my YouTube channel. The film A Train Near Magdeburg is in production and coming in 2027. To learn more about the progress of the film, visit MagdeburgTrain.com and to support, the Augusta Chiwy Foundation.

a letter from a soldier describing what he saw at the train. 4.17.45

April 17, 1945

Dear Chaplain;-

Haven’t written you in many months now, its funny how a few moments are so hard to find in which to write a letter way past due; it’s much easier to keep putting it off the way I’ve done. I’ll try to make up for it in this letter.

Today I saw a sight that’s impossible to describe, however I’ll try. Between 2400 and 3000 German refugees were overran by my division during our last operation; most of them were, or had been, inmates of concentration camps, their crimes the usual ones, – Jewish parentage, political differences with der Fuhrer, lack of sympathy for the SS, or just plain bad luck. Not one of these hundreds could walk one mile and survive; they had been packed on a train whose normal capacity was perhaps four or five hundred, and had been left there days without food.

Our division military government unit took charge of them, and immediately saw what a huge job it was going to be, so they sent out a call for help. Several of our officers went out to help them organize the camp they were setting up for them. The situation was extremely ticklish we soon learned; no one could smoke as it started a riot when the refugees saw the cigarette, and we couldn’t give the kiddies anything or they would have been trampled to death in the rush that would result when anything resembling food was displayed. The only nourishment they were capable of eating was soup; now the army doesn’t issue any of the Heinz’s 57 varieties, so we watered down C-ration[s] and it served quite well.  It was necessary to use force to make the people stay in line in order to serve them. They had no will power left, only the characteristics of beasts.

A few weeks of decent food will change them into a semblance of normal human beings; with God willing the plague of disease that was already underway, will be diverted; but I’m wondering what the affect of their ordeal they have been through, will be on their minds; most will carry scars for the rest of their days for the beatings that they were given. No other single thing had convinced me as this experience has that Germany isn’t fit to survive as a nation. I’ll never forget today.

I was going to write mother tonight but thought better of it. I’ll be in a better frame of mind tomorrow. I’m only a few dozen miles from Berlin right now, and its hard to realize the end is in sight. I’m always glad to receive your scandal sheet. You perhaps missed your calling, as your editorial abilities are quite plain.

As ever,

Charles.

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Nuremberg, 80 Years on.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 23, 2025| 2 Comments »

During the first Nuremberg Trial, American guards maintain constant surveillance over the major Nazi war criminals in the prison attached to the Palace of Justice. Nuremberg, Germany, November 1945. NARA, public domain, via USHMM. I interviewed the third guard on the left side.

My wife and I went to see the 2025 film Nuremberg yesterday, starring, among others, Russell Crowe as Hermann Goering and Rami Malek as the psychiatrist assigned to him. Overall, while unfamiliar with the story of Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley, I felt the film was generally well done from the aspect of a Holocaust and World War II educator. I felt that, for the most part, the portrayal of chief prosecutor was well done, particularly from the angle of setting precedent for holding war criminals accountable for their individual actions. This was the first time in the history of the world that this had been attempted; leaders of a nation—military commanders, government officials, and propagandists—were held personally responsible for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, destroying the defense of “I was only following orders.” It created the legal foundation for modern human rights.

The International Military Tribunals debuted in Nuremberg for a reason, which was well brought out in the film. It was the central rallying point for the massive Nazi displays of power in the early days of the Reich—see Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934-35 classic documentary, Triumph of the Will, which I would show to my seniors despite its almost two hour run time— and the sinister 1935 Nuremberg Laws that defined ‘Jewishness’ and codified antisemitism, beginning with stripping German Jews of their civil rights.

What a lot of folks who may be familiar with the Nuremberg trial portrayed here may not actually be aware of is that it was only the first of several trials. Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson set the tone early on.

Documenting the truth of Nazi crimes was the signature achievement. The trials produced an enormous body of evidence—captured documents, films, photographs, eyewitness testimony, and first-hand accounts from perpetrators. The authentic films of the camps upon liberation were included in this movie, and while hard to watch, just like in 1945-46, it showcased that the Holocaust one of the most documented crimes in world history, countering future denial with overwhelming proof.

The trials also set a moral example after a global catastrophe. Rather than executing Nazi leaders summarily—as some Allied leaders wanted—the Allies insisted on a lawful trial. This demonstrated that justice would not be simply vengeance, that the rule of law was stronger than dictatorship, and even the worst crimes deserved legal scrutiny.

To be sure, Hollywood took some liberties. The scenes portraying Jackson as being outwitted by Goering on the stand, and in which the psychiatrist Kelley hands over confidential notes to a gorgeous reporter in an intoxicated state were outright fabrications, to be sure. Others have criticized it for showing the humanity of the chief perpetrators, but I do not have much of a problem with that. For if we hold that they were all monsters, we are just letting humanity off the hook for the next time, as I have written about before, and while I speak for myself, many professionals in Holocaust education circles are in agreement.

But let’s not forget about the everyday GIs who found themselves at Nuremburg. In Volume 7, Across the Rhine, I introduce at least two of the guards to you, in their own words.

The Courtroom Sentinel

Leo DiPalma was the son of Italian immigrants who grew up in the western part of Massachusetts in the Great Depression. Like many young high schoolers at the time, he was shocked at the news of Pearl Harbor, and ready to serve when his number was called three years later at the age of eighteen. He gained combat experience as an infantryman with the 79th Division, crossing the Rhine in 1945 before being tasked with a new assignment in the 1st Division—standing guard, at the tender age of nineteen, over some of the most notorious war criminals of the 20th century.

I pulled guard duty in the cell block [at Nuremberg]. The cell block was sort of a center, like a star, and all these blocks went off this way [gestures several radial corridors with hand]. Well one of these blocks had the 21 bigwigs, Hermann Goering and Ribbentrop and Hess and all those guys. I was a staff sergeant at the time. I pulled guard on Albert Speer’s cell, and Rudolf Hess. Then after that I was there for a short while, I became sergeant of the guard. I took my regular duties every other day for 24 hours. Luckily, I was asked to go up into the courtroom. I pulled guard with the courtroom guard at one of the visitor doors. After that, I was asked to go up onto the witness stand. That was very interesting, because from where we stood, we weren’t too far from the interpreters. If they were speaking German, and you could pick out [the English translations], you know, so you could know what’s going on, that was very, very interesting. I actually had, at that time, the latter part of the 21 original prisoners, like von Schirach, and Raeder, and Donitz, and Sauckel, right around that area there. I was moving up real fast. I stayed there until July of ’46.

‘Goering and I, We Didn’t get Along’

I had a lot of contact [with these prisoners]. Goering, he was the highest-ranking German soldier there. He expected to be treated like he was a high-ranking officer. The rest of them, believe it or not, they used to bow down to him, let him go first and stuff like that. He and I didn’t get along when I took over sergeant of the guard.

One of my duties was, during a recess, when I opened the door, I stood at parade rest right in the docket where he was right in the corner. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of it. He would turn to me, and he asked me for some water. ‘Vasser, bitte.’ Okay. I go down to the Lyster bag, which was chlorinated, and I’d get him a little cup of water, and I’d bring it up to him. And he’d take a sip and he’d go, ‘Bah, Americanich.’ You know? He’d hand it back to me. Now there was no way of getting rid of the water; I used to have to walk down to the men’s room on this side to get rid of the water and walk back up.

Mr. DiPalma later recalled that fed up with Goering’s antics, he once met Goering’s demands by replacing the contents of the cup with water from the toilet instead of the tap, which Goering found better than the chlorinated version. ‘I guess I felt it was my little contribution to the war effort,’ he added.

In the meantime, you know, I think he was just doing it on purpose, just getting rid of me. I think one of the things was that he didn’t want to do any talking, didn’t know if maybe I spoke German or stuff like that. I could understand a little bit. But what he didn’t know is, we had some German-speaking GIs right there, and they picked up some stuff on him anyway.

Another time, at night when court was over, one of my duties as the sergeant of the guard was to run the elevator. The elevator was located behind a docket in one of the panels. The elevator carried six people: three prisoners, two guards, and myself, made it [one guard to one prisoner], going up or going down. Well at night, we had to get out of there and run and get our trucks to get back to our billet. Everybody would step back, and there’s big confusion in the docket. [The Germans] let [Goering] go right through, you know. Well, one night, I grabbed ahold of Field Marshal Keitel, he was standing right there. I said, ‘Come on, get in, get in.’ And I dragged him in like that. He was indignant; he was going to let Goering get [in first]. I pulled somebody else in, and somebody else, and I left him, left Goering standing there, you know. I think that was one of the reasons why he would send me for water every day, he was getting back at me.

Another time everybody in the docket was stepping over one another, letting him get out first; they were going to lunch. He didn’t want to cross the hallway where spectators were, he wanted to walk right across—he didn’t want anybody to look at him. So this Captain Gilbert told us, ‘Put him last.’ Okay, so we put him last. Don’t let him stand inside of the doorway. He would wait until everybody went by so he [would have to] walk straight across. Well, I pushed him out there one time, we carried a club, poked him in the back, you know. He turned around and he swung at me, and he hit me on the arm, so I gave him an awful belt in the kidneys. He never said a word to me [after that]. He didn’t like me; I know he didn’t like me. I had a couple confrontations with him, but other than Goering, the rest of them were all pretty good.

Albert Speer, many of them spoke English. I never heard Goering speak English. Albert Speer, he was Hitler’s architect, if you remember correctly. I always felt sorry for him. He was the architect, but he kind of got, I think, using the right word here, sucked into being a Nazi, and he turned out to be a Nazi. Of course, this was all for glory, I guess, for himself. I think Hitler just used him. He was a very calm-speaking individual. Always spoke to the guards. He was quite an artist. He never did me, but some of the other guys that pulled guard on some of these cell blocks, on his cell, he used to draw pencil sketches of them, and they were good. Very, very good. Imagine something like that’s worth a buck today. I don’t have that.

Let’s see, Streicher, he was a pain in the neck, complained all the time. Terrible, terrible. Going back just a little bit, when I pulled guard on the cell block, imagine standing there for an hour and watching the guy sleep through a little hole in the door, you know, it’s awful monotonous. The guys used to talk to one another, and the other guys would get to laughing. Some of them [prisoners] didn’t get much sleep at night. You kind of had to keep it down; when I was sergeant of the guard, sometimes you used to hear hollering down there, so I had to go down there and tell the guys to knock it off. Have you ever seen the old German pfennig? It’s their penny. It’s about as big as our half dollar. Well, one of the things they used to do at night, this wing had a terrazzo floor. These guys would roll these pennies down the terrazzo floor, and it sounded like a freight train coming down through there! [Laughs] I’m surprised that a lot of the German prisoners could stay awake in the courtroom the next day.

Another night, I was in the guard office, and I had a cot there, I was laying there. I could hear some screaming. I said, ‘Oh my God!’ I went down there and the guard at Streicher’s door, out of monotony, had taken a piece of paper and folded it, and he had ripped a little man out of it, so that when you opened it up, it was a man with just legs and arms like that and the head. And from off his uniform somewhere, he had tied a piece of string [tied to the neck of the effigy]. You had the light on just outside of the cell, and he’s swinging the thing in front of the light, and it’s [silhouetting] on the wall, a man hanging. [Chuckles] Jeez. I really don’t blame him for trying to get through the hours, standing there.

Let’s see, von Schirach, I pulled guard on the witness stand with him. He was head of the Hitler Youth. One day, there was quite a confrontation between him and Chief Justice Jackson. Of course, we could understand him. And he spoke decent English now, but most of his replies were in German. But through the interpreter, we could hear what was going on. They were arguing back and forth about the duties of the Hitler Youth. Well, they called a recess shortly after that, and he turned to me. I was on his left side. He turned to me, and he said, ‘But the Hitler Youth is nothing more than your Boy Scouts.’

I said, ‘Really?’ He doesn’t realize that I was a frontline soldier.

I said, ‘I fought your Hitler Youth!’ He never said a word [after that]. We found Hitler Youth that could take apart our BAR, our M1s, or any of our equipment. So they weren’t Boy Scouts like he wanted to portray them.

The rest of them were all just no problems, really. No problems. Alfred Jodl, he was a signer of the surrender terms. He didn’t talk to anybody. Him and Keitel, they weren’t Nazis, but they originally were Wehrmacht soldiers, and they were good soldiers. But of course, they turned into Nazis afterwards, you know?

*

I came home in July, yeah, about three months before the trial ended. [I was not present when Goering committed suicide]; I think [he died] the beginning of October, as I recall.  Everybody was trying to get their autographs. In fact, I have their autographs. All but Hess. Every time you’d ask Hess for his autograph, he spoke good English, because he spent quite a bit of time in England, he said, ‘after the trials.’

Well, you know what our favorite saying was? ‘You won’t be here after the trials.’

Nuremberg’s message endures:
No one, no matter how powerful, is above the law—and the world will remember.

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“For the Liberating Forces, it was a Glorious Moment of Triumph”.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on April 10, 2025| 2 Comments »

Screenshot of combat Medic Walter Gantz, and child survivor Oscar Schwartz, Warren County Community College, New Jersey, April 2019. Walter was 94 and would pass away before year’s end.

As we enter April 2025, the eightieth anniversary of liberation, more and more posts are rightly being generated on social media regarding it. Yad Vashem, World Holocaust Center, Jerusalem, earlier in the week posted a liberation photo on Facebook titled, “French soldiers meeting Jewish people who survived near Vaihingen, Germany, April 1945.” Their description:


“In the final months of the war, concentration camps were gradually liberated one after another. For the liberating forces, it was a glorious moment of triumph. But for the survivors — those who endured the horrors — the relief at war’s end was overshadowed by immeasurable pain and loss.
Freedom had arrived — but for many, it came too late.”

I shared it on my Facebook page, with my own take on their description.

Well, some decided they had to take me to task in the comments, the gist of which was that in pointing out the traumatic effects on liberating soldiers, I was disrespecting the experiences of the people they saved.

I recognize the trauma—I have been honored to know literally dozens of Holocaust survivors—and I have studied for nineteen days at their International School in Jerusalem, as well as experienced several weeks of touring the authentic sites of mass murder and suffering in this greatest crime in the history of the world with top notch scholars and historians and fellow teachers. Also, having been a USHMM Teacher Fellow, I felt pretty well informed enough to add my comment there, just that for the liberating forces, far from being a glorious moment of triumph, it was decades of trauma as well.

I don’t dispute any of their comments, but I think they were making assumptions, so I clarified, “Just as liberation was not the ‘happy end of the story’ for Jewish survivors, it did not end for the soldiers either. And no one is here to ‘compare pain’.”

And that is one of the tenets of Holocaust education. No one can suppose they know what the Holocaust survivors went through, except them, and that is why memoirs are so important. But to talk to the liberating forces, decades later, was also important. Walter Gantz told me, “Matt, for forty years, when our group (95th Medical Gas Battalion) met at reunions, we NEVER talked of Hillersleben. And my parents never knew I cried myself to sleep at night, when I got back.”

I found this video I took at a college in New Jersey where Walter got to meet one of the children he helped to save for the first time, and his take on his visit to Bergen Belsen. The trauma was still apparent after almost 75 years.

That’s all I was trying to say. So now I’ll let Walter tell you. It’s a 3 minute clip. [Only 8 people in the world have watched it thus far. I hope you can, in his memory.]

And I will end with the closing of my book, A Train Near Magdeburg:

A schoolkid once asked a survivor I know if anything good came out of the Holocaust. The survivor thought a minute, because it was an important question, and replied, ‘Yes. My rescuers.’
And here is where the story of the ‘Train Near Magdeburg’ will end, for now.

When we talk about the Holocaust, the sheer magnitude of it, there is no happy ending. For every single one of the approximately two-thousand five-hundred persons on the train who was set free, another two-thousand five-hundred persons perished in the Holocaust, most long before the Americans set foot upon the continent. And yet, at the end of the day, if we can say that somehow the soldiers and survivors in this book taught us something, perhaps the meaning is echoed in that three-word response.

I have found that in some educational circles the role of the American liberator is presented almost as an afterthought, and I would have to agree that when one is drawn into the unfathomable study of the Holocaust, liberation perhaps figures as a literal nano-episode.

They were not rescuers, in the formal sense of the word—that title is reserved for those without weapons, who risked their lives and usually the lives of their families by hiding Jews or some such noble action—but the nobility of the would-be rescuers who had weapons, the ones still fighting and being killed, the ones wholly unprepared for the catastrophes that played out before them on an hourly basis in April 1945 deserves a larger place in our national examination of the essence of what, indeed, ‘greatness’ is all about.

And here, I hope that the lesson is also one of humility; as they themselves stated in this book, it’s not about hero worship, or glorifying the liberator as some kind of savior. Many of the liberating soldiers would resist 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.’

Eyewitnesses to the greatest crime in the history of the world; young men who ‘kept the faith’ of their fallen comrades, their country, and to humanity; witnesses who did something about what they saw.


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Welcome to 2025. Was it really that long ago?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 25, 2025| 4 Comments »

Welcome to 2025, a momentous year for World War II remembrance and history. So glad that you can join us for these updates, the ‘octogintennial’ anniversary of the end of the war, and of the greatest crime in the history of the world, the Holocaust.Today is special for several reasons, two of which I will outline below.

Road to St. Vith, January 24, 1945. National Archives.

On December 16, 1944, the Battle of the Bulge began as Hitler’s last ditch effort to drive a wedge between the advancing American and British forces with a quarter million man German counteroffensive following D-Day and the Normandy breakouts of the summer and fall. Today, January 25, eighty years ago, all German forces had been pushed back to their original starting points; while the fight was not over for a long shot, today marked a turning point in the war in Europe.  Nineteen thousand American boys were killed in the bloodiest US battle of WWII, over the course of six weeks, in the coldest winter in European memory. Average age, 19. 80 years?  Was it really that long ago?





USHMM via Reuters.

Also on this day in 1945, the German SS dynamited the building of gas chamber and crematorium V in Auschwitz-Birkenau to destroy the evidence of their crimes as the Red Army approached from the east. The liberation of Auschwitz, the most notorious killing center of World War II, was at hand, the eightieth anniversary of which will be commemorated on Monday, January 27; one of my good Holocaust educator friends is co-leading a delegation of 50 or so survivors for this occasion. Talli and I were there together in an emotional journey I wrote about in my book, A Train Near Magdeburg.

This gas chamber operated from April 1943 to January 1945; Zyklon B was dumped in through openings after people were inside. 1.1 million people were murdered here, in a VERY short amount of time.

So what does it all mean, eighty years on? Time marches on, but as you may have read in my books, it’s not so much ‘how soon we forget’, as it is, ‘did we take the time to listen‘ the first time around, to our teachers, to our veterans? Do we as Americans even know our history? You know, in my books, I let the veterans and survivors speak for themselves, and for their friends and family who were killed or murdered. [I’m preaching to the choir now, and that’s the last thing I want to do-but hopefully we don’t move on until we pause and say their names.] 

And I’ll leave you with an upbeat note- I went into the classroom again in December to talk about Pearl Harbor and a local kid who died there, as I discussed in my first book, The Things Our Fathers Saw, Vol. 1, Voices of the Pacific. First time since retirement, and I’m happy to report the old man still has it, and the teenagers were HUNGRY for this knowledge, just like they were when I taught them at this high school in upstate NY. I left them all with free copies of that book with 19 year old Randy Holmes remembered in it. I’ll leave you with some books mentioned in this email below for further reading, and report back soon with some updates as 2025 moves on, with the anniversaries, and with our upcoming mini-series.Exciting!

~Matthew Rozell, Author/Educator

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Deliver us.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 13, 2024| 2 Comments »

Liberation site, 13 April 2024. Photo by Daniel Keweloh. Note the visitation remembrance stones on the memorial.

April, 1945. Testimony of 17 year old Hungarian survivor Irene Bleier.

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

The next morning we dug up recently planted potatoes we found, made a fire, and cooked them. They tasted delicious. I again started walking towards the small pond, but then Jolan excitedly hollered to me: ‘Hey you, come back fast, the US Army has arrived!’

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

Standing there and looking up at our liberators, I waited to sense some kind of emotion on this miraculous occasion—but no. Reality did not penetrate my consciousness. My senses were incapable of experiencing any signs of emotion; I had no tears of joy that appeared, nor even the slightest smile. My senses were left stiff, in the aftermath of extended suffering. We are liberated, but only outwardly. Our mind still remained under great pressure, as heavy, dark clouds obscured our world of comprehension. It will take a good many years to be free completely. When that time comes, if ever, we will be able to feel wholly liberated and shake off the shackles of bondage and imperceptible suffering. The majority of our group was so feeble that they stayed inside the crowded cattle cars. Some ventured to the nearby small towns for provisions. The following day, early in the afternoon, the US Army arrived with a big army truck. They brought us a delicious hot meal, potato goulash with veal meat. Never before in my life, or after, did I eat as tasty a meal as this. I just looked on as those US soldiers of valor took care of our group of two thousand, going from cattle car to cattle car so patiently. After suffering so long from inhuman treatment, I felt a great distinction to be treated with human kindness by those American soldiers. It was like being born again.

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

April 13.

Another year has gone by, since 1945, and since 2001 when I sat down with an 80 year old veteran, who would up telling me a story.

Today I am thinking of all my survivor families and friends, including those of the soldiers, who have now all pretty much left us. Last April on this day, I spoke to cadets at the USMA at West Point, officers in training about to go out into the world, about the actions of their forebearers across the generations at a place called Farsleben, Germany, honored to be there with the commanding general at my table.

Mike, Laura, Lee, and I then flew to Israel for a multi-day tour, interviewing a dozen or so survivors of the train and their families, thanks to our friend Varda W.

In June, the film crew made it up to Hudson Falls and the homestead to get more interviews.

In July, we discovered the lost footage of the train liberation shot on April 14, 1945 by the US Signal Corps. The discovery went ‘viral’ and has been viewed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times.

In October, we toured the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and interviewed historians and archivists who watched the story unfold, and gave their input for the film. We also talked to the United States’ Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues at the State Department. We know they appreciated this story, and we appreciate their interest and commitment, as it to no less than 60 communications to navigate and set up our interview.

Leaving Washington the afternoon of October 7, it became clear over the next few weeks that things had changed. The sheer horror and scale of the massacre and violence was dumbfounding as its scope became clear, on an unprecedented scale, since the Holocaust. The calculated evil that rolled through that morning and almost immediately elicited support in some cities in the west remains profoundly disturbing.

But today, as the world goes about its destructive business, a quiet ceremony took place at the liberation site in Farsleben, Germany, with committed locals and 2nd Gen survivors. My friend from Hillersleben Daniel K. took some photos. A beautiful April day, liberation day and today.

I spoke to attentive 10th graders this week, bringing them the message of what the soldiers did. We remember.

We hope to return next year for the 80th anniversary with the completed film, for more people to learn from, when the liberation anniversary appropriately falls on Passover.

Deliver us from evil.

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“THREE CHEERS FOR AMERICA!”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on July 29, 2023| 21 Comments »

Newly discovered US Army footage of the Train Near Magdeburg surfaces after 78 years.

‘Three Cheers For America.’ Note numbers on car, Car #16 out of 52. Colorized still from newly discovered film.
American soldier handing out food, backing up as starving people swarm him. Colorized still from newly discovered film.

If you are coming to this website cold, as a public high school history teacher, 22 summers ago I sat down with an 80 year old WWII veteran, initially reluctant to tell his story, and almost forgetting to tell this part of it, but eventually, the following came out.

In the closing days of the war, fighting across central Germany, he and another tank commander came across a train stalled by the tracks with desperate people milling about. They were 2500 Holocaust victims from Bergen-Belsen. And they needed immediate help. Their major and one of the tank commanders had a camera. After my interviews with them, they gave me permission to place the photos on the school website.

Farsleben train, moment of liberation, Friday the 13th of April,1945. Two American tank commanders and their major in a jeep liberate the train. Major Benjamin snaps the photo.

Four years ticked by. Then I heard from a grandmother in Australia who had been a seven-year old girl on the train. Others followed. I was able to re-unite the liberators with the people and the families they saved as young men. Over eleven reunions on three continents took place. So now, twenty-two years after our initial interview, this footage of the event appears in my life.

Another miracle in a story of miracles. And this one is HUGE.

 A contact in Germany, Susanne at the museum in Wolmirstedt near the Farsleben, Germany liberation site outside of the city of Magdeburg on the Elbe River, recently emailed to say that she had seen part of a German documentary that included footage of people milling about a long train transport, and US Army soldiers helping, dispensing food and the like. She wondered if it was our train. Having been to the liberation site in person, and studying this story for decades, I was sure from the five seconds or so of a liberated train I watched that it was indeed our train.

Our team led by Mike Edwards inquired at the National Archives and just four weeks later, they sent the following footage to us. Of course, it had been filmed by the US Army Signal Corps in the aftermath of the Friday the 13th of April 1945 liberation, when our tankers of the 743rd came upon the train.

Newly discovered US Army footage of Farsleben train, April 1945. National Archives, public domain.
NARA photo of film reel can.

US SIGNAL CORPS footage reel dated 4.17.1945, in the immediate aftermath of the train’s liberation by the 743 Tank Battalion and 30th Infantry Division. No sound. From NARA: “Summary: Numerous scenes, freed Jewish prisoners in groups along railroad tracks. Their expressions furnish a clue to the suffering they endured. Individual shots: Men, women, and children, some of them in various stages of emaciation. Flashes of US soldiers distributing food. The group surrounding the soldiers push forward to receive meager bits of food. LS, village being shelled by German artillery from across the Elbe River.”

My best guess is that it was taken on Saturday 4.14.45, given the other US Signal Corps photographs from that day. What is fantastic is that this footage gives us a better perspective on liberation and its aftermath. Poignant and moving scenes: men crushing lice in their clothing. Families sprawled out, resting in the mid-April sunshine. Crowds swarming a soldier distributing food, bring to mind the Chuck Kincaid letter dated April 17, in which he expresses shock and horror at what he was seeing. A father holding his young daughter up so she can witness, and also put her hand out with the others. People in obvious distress, some likely very sick, some so exhausted they can hardly make an expression for the cameraman. The unsmiling little boy in hat, looking into the camera. The European script writing, numbering the cars, 52 of them, on the side of one of the cars; my guess is that it was done at Bergen-Belsen as they loaded the cars. And, of course, the beautiful American soldiers, trying to distribute food. Just who are they?

Red Walsh and George Gross and their tanks had departed for the final battle by the time of the Signal Corps arrival. Frank Towers was there, in and out that day, and medic Walter Gantz remembered being there that day.

I have been asked how I feel about this, surfacing 22 years to the day of my original interview with Red Walsh. With many of the stills, we have an entirely new portfolio of pictures to go through. We have already made one positive identification: the family of poet Yaakov Barzilai writes to confirm that he is visible in the footage, along with Yaakov’s mother and sister.

Top to bottom, in circle: Yaakov Barzilai, his sister Yehudit, his mother Iren, seated.
Yaakov and author this spring in Israel.

So if you are a person who follows my blog from the early days, you know that not just is this an astounding development, but also one that confirms again that the past still has secrets to reveal, that in contextualizing the photos and film into the story of the Train Near Magdeburg, more healing is already taking place in our mission to ‘repair the world’. [And if you can see yourself, your family, or recognize any of the people, reach out to me here in the comments, or drop a line to matthew@matthewrozellbooks.com.]

A boy after liberation.

So, how does this make me FEEL? Frankly, it is immensely gratifying, though even without this footage, this is an incredible story. But to actually see the newly discovered film is another nail in the coffin of Holocaust denial. The soldiers didn’t lie. They WITNESSED it with their own eyes, and suffered the consequences themselves.

I cannot say that I am entirely shocked or stunned at this amazing development, because, as I told my wife, this is larger than any of us. We are part of a cosmic, maybe holy process, a process of the unfolding of the ‘so many miracles’ of this story. I’m sad that my four soldier friends mentioned above and all my survivor friends who have also now passed, are not with us to see it, to comment on it, to share in it with me and the living survivors and their families. But I am grateful to be able to live it now, and I am proud that those twenty-two years ago I had the audacity to want to have a conversation with a reluctant World War II veteran, and the curiosity to pause and take note of what he revealed upon his daughter’s prompting, to begin what would become this never-ending journey to help heal the world, and now with a team dedicated to telling this story to the world on film. It is with an undying sense of Wonder that we get to witness yet again the Power of LOVE transcending Time and Space. Of the GOOD countering the evil.

Seventy-eight years vanishes in an instant. This project is a portal, evidenced many times over. So I’m proud of it, but also humbled by it. And I’m humbled by all the people all over the world who have also come believe in it, and champion the message, and healing the world with their own love and compassion. This is larger than all of us.

Below you will find a gallery of stills of the train and the people captured on that film 78 years ago, which I derived/created this weekend from the public domain film, and also added some color to, to highlight the scenes. [Tap the thumbnails for the information icon with my labels/captions; please write for permission if you wish to use any of them.] And don’t forget to write or comment below if you recognize someone!

The rest of the US Army Signal Corps film can be viewed here, including the famed ‘meeting at the Elbe’ on April 25 and 26 at Torgau.

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“We will come back…” Remembering Babi Yar at 80 years

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on September 29, 2021|

Today marks a watershed moment in the history of the Holocaust, one I knew little about until my advanced studies.

Over 33,000 people were murdered, by hand, at close range, at the edge of a ravine.

In two days.

Did you learn about this in school? Why was it not widely known? The killers came from all over Germany, ‘ordinary men’, the bulk of whom went on to live out their days unaccountable for their crimes. Perhaps some are still walking among us.

So I’ll share these two posts that came up in my social media feed this morning. The first is from the organization. ‘Yahad – In Unum is the leading research organization investigating the mass executions of more than 2 million Jews and tens of thousands Roma/Gypsy people in Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1944.’ Important, literally groundbreaking work. Check Father out.

The second is from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (where I studied for three incredible weeks!), Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority and World Holocaust Remembrance Center, ‘the ultimate source for Holocaust education, remembrance, documentation, and research. From the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem’s approach incorporates meaningful educational initiatives, groundbreaking research, and inspirational exhibits,’ one of which is in the link.

Study the faces. Never forget.

80 long years have passed since the 29th and 30th September 1941. Commemorating the Babi Yar massacre is not about remembering a number, however great it may be.
It is about remembering that more than 30,000 women, children, men, grandparents were taken from their homes, were forced to move to an unknown destination, a destination that would become their Babi Yar grave, simply because they were born Jewish.

The Ravine at Babi-Yar. September, 1941.


They were shot by German gunmen from all over Germany. And then thousands of neighbors watched, most of them passive, as their Jewish neighbors left the building forever.
80 years have passed. The memory was suppressed during the Soviet era, the bodies were burned by the Germans to erase forever the evidence of the crimes committed.
Finally, a memorial is being built after so many years of absence. It will probably be the first large memorial located near a mass grave.
Mass graves do not usually serve as memorials. The victims are killed, the pits are filled and silence falls.
This memorial is an act of justice for these women, children, adults shot because they were Jews. One by one we find the sacred names of each of them.
Today, over 150 German criminals at Babi Yar have been identified. Tens of thousands of Jewish victims are being identified.
A man-made mass crime machine is made up of human beings. Every German, every Ukrainian is fully responsible for having taken part in the Nazi criminal machine.
Babi Yar also represents a reminder that other mass murders have been perpetrated, by ISIS in broad daylight in Syria, in Iraq, by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by others in the Mail, in Niger.
Babi Yar is also a signal: sooner or later, where you kill, throw bodies into pits, we will come back. The names of the victims will be found and sanctified. The names of the perpetrators will not be drowned in silence.

-Father Patrick Desbois, Yahad – In Unum

Marking 80 years to the Murder of the Jews at Babi Yar >> https://bit.ly/3kGVRSh

On 29-30 September 1941, approximately 33,771 Jewish men, women and children from Kiev and the surrounding areas were murdered at Babi Yar by Einsatzgruppe C soldiers with the assistance of local collaborators. Jews who managed to escape the massacre in September but were discovered in the ensuing months, were also brought to Babi Yar and murdered.

80 photos and stories of the Jews murdered at Babi Yar are now online in a special exhibit just launched on the Yad Vashem website.

The photos were submitted to Yad Vashem together with Pages of Testimony containing the names and brief biographical information of the victims. Each Page is a mute testament to the persecution of an entire Jewish community: Rabbis, teachers and pupils, traders and artisans, philosophers and scientists- and in many cases entire families.

In this moving exhibit we can see the faces and explore the stories of 80 of the Jewish men, women and children who were murdered 80 years ago at a ravine called Babi Yar. Explore the exhibit here >> https://bit.ly/3kGVRSh

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“Here we are! We have arrived!”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 25, 2021|

Holocaust survivor Ariela Rojek, right, was 11 years old in 1945 when she and 2,500 other concentration camp prisoners aboard a train near Magdeburg, Germany, were liberated by American forces including 1st Lt. Frank Towers, left with his son Frank Towers Jr., center. “You gave me my second life,” Rojek told Towers Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011, at Hudson Falls High School during an event reuniting soldiers and survivors. Jason McKibben Glens Falls Post Star

It was 12 years ago years ago this evening, we shared a meal on the eve of Shabbat, after watching ourselves on a national broadcast that reached millions. Why does it seem, so long ago?

Maybe because it all seems so unbelievable- that out of the darkness of the past, on a day when the sun dawned clearly and was warming the Earth in its mid-April morning ascent, a low rumble was heard by  hushed and huddled groupings of tormented humanity as they strained to hope for friends amidst their lurking murderers. As the metallic clanking grew louder, over the horizon broke the earthly angels, two Sherman light tanks and an American Jeep with the emblem of the white star. A cry broke out. They realized they were saved, and the American major snapped a photograph at the exact moment the overjoyed survivors realized it.

And out of the past on a warm September day, we brought them all together again. Who would have believed that 62 years later, a high school in a quiet, rural part of the world would  bring the soldier-liberators and the rescued survivors together from the US, Canada, Israel and elsewhere? All because I couldn’t let go of a good narrative history, and pursued the story behind the photographs that proved it really happened?

And think about the risk you run, inviting hundreds of octogenarians to come to a high school for half a week to mingle with thousands of high school and middle schoolers? Talk about sweating bullets. What if they are uncomfortable? Cranky? Complaining? What if the kids I can’t control are rude? And what if one of these “old” folks, who I don’t even know, dies on our watch? I would lie awake at night wondering if I was out of my mind.

But the miracle came to be-for the two dozen or so elders who could come, tears flowed, wine spilled, and our “new grandparents” danced with young teenagers who adored them, but only after the risk was accepted, with the enthusiastic help of Mary Murray, Tara Winchell-Sano, and Lisa Hogan, Rene Roberge and others. Have a look at the videos, and feel the love. We created ripples, and tripped the wires of the cosmos, and the reverberations are still echoing. To date, with Varda Weisskopf’s and Frank Towers’ help, the list is at 275 survivors whom we have found. And how many generations has it effected?

This is the subject of my second book, A TRAIN NEAR MAGDEBURG, the PBS film of which is due out in 2022. In the meantime, I am working on a shorter work of what I have learned in teaching the lessons of the Holocaust. So take a look at the videos, and remember the words of the liberator:

“Here we are! We have arrived!”

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Dachau and the question I had never been able to ask my father.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 4, 2021| 2 Comments »

April 30 1945 Headlines. Hangs in my classroom.

April 30 1945 Headlines, on display in my classroom.

A few days ago, it was the anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, 76 years on. 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

http://bit.ly/Dachau70

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