Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Power of Teaching’

Books.

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

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

the books.

the books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Full Post »

Remember Me.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 7, 2013| 3 Comments »

Bergen Belsen on July 5, 2013.

Bergen Belsen on July 5, 2013.

I am in Europe on a study tour of the Holocaust with 25 fellow educators of the United States. I am typing this as the morning breaks in the heart of Berlin, Germany. I had hoped to be able to get on-line and write more frequently but that is just not possible. There is too much to do while we are here visiting these authentic sites. But it is time to stop and reflect on some of the things that I have seen and experienced.

Our itinerary includes stops in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. The power of visiting these sites after studying them so long can not be overstated.

Bergen-Belsen. For me, visiting this place after studying it in depth in relation to the exchange camps that were here was a powerful experience. Readers of the blog know of the stories of many of the survivors of Bergen Belsen who were in the exchange camp and their liberation on April 13, 1945 at Farsleben. Two days ago I got the back story of the exhibition panels you see here, that feature the photographs and the work that our project has uncovered.

In brief context: 120,000 prisoners passed through Bergen Belsen, and not all of them Jewish. 52,000 died here, perhaps 30,000 of them were Jewish. Belsen actually began as a POW camp- 20,000 Russians died here in the winter of 1941-42. In 1943, Himmler (the head of the SS) ordered that an exchange camp be set up for Jews who might possess foreign certificates or visas to emigrate, perhaps to use to bargain for German families interned abroad. 14,000 people went through the exchange camp. In November, 1944, thousands of women, and some children, including the Frank sisters, arrived from Auschwitz, to be “housed” near the exchange camp. What they received, in their miserable condition, were 18 oversized old tents which promptly blew down during a winter storm shortly after their arrival. With the arrival also of brutal SS administrators and guards, conditions deteriorated rapidly as the winter of 1944-45 turned into spring. The camp system began collapsing with the advance of the Red Army in the east and the British and Americans in the West. By the time the British arrived on April 15th at the camp gates, over 50,000 prisoners were suffering from extreme malnutrition, typhus, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Nearly ten thousand corpses lay about as the crematorium had long since broken down. Hundreds died on the day of liberation.

I'm here. Finally. Jerrilyn Miller photo.

I’m here. Finally. Jerrilyn Miller photo.

So here I am. The bus guides swiftly through the beautiful German countryside. A night in the picturesque town of Celle the evening before has us well rested. The fields and forests bid us peaceful feelings as we move with our rendezvous with the past. It feels as if as we move we are stepping back in time.

Memorial site, Bergen Belsen.

Memorial site, Bergen Belsen.

We see the road signs for the memorial and I think many of us on the bus draw a collective breath as it turns into the parking lot of Gedenkstatte (Memorial) Bergen Belsen. It is surrounded by trees. We are the only persons, besides staff, who are here. As we disembark off the bus, Tif ties an Israeli flag around her neck so it drapes like a cape. It is quiet. But the birds are singing.

Now I remember that in 2007 I was beginning my first communications with Christian and Bernd, then staff members at the Memorial. They were excited about the opening of their new exhibition hall and education center. Two years later they would fly over, with the historian Thomas, to take part in our 2009 reunion. So now I am here for the first time to see them again.

We meet the staff, who are still preparing for us. I’m listed on the program at lunchtime for a talk about the exchange camps and how the project is incorporated into the exhibition. Bernd enters the room and greets me warmly.

After an introduction to the history of the site, we  watch the silent movies shot by the British beginning the second day after the liberation. Perhaps you’ve seen the photos or the films. Belsen, in 1945, was the last stop, the terminus of the Holocaust, as one historian has described it. It was a scene of horror. If you see a photo of a soldier wearing a mask, maneuvering a bulldozer to push corpses into an open pit, that was Bergen Belsen. Just over a month later, the British commander ordered the lice infested, typhus ridden barracks put to the torch.
So now we are on the grounds of the former camp. As we exit the exhibition memorial hall, we are confronted with a long narrow corridor of concrete that we must pass through, reinforcing the fact that we are moving from present to past. And now we are here.DSC00432
To some visitors, there is nothing here, just inviting walkways with interpretive signage and some markers. Woods, and open fields. But on closer inspection, we see the outlines of the past in the ruins. We walk to barracks ten of the exchange camp. You can see the outline at the woodline. Some of the foundation stones are marked with the names of those who passed through them. We retrace the steps from the barracks to the latrine, now many meters away off a footpath in the enveloping woods. Nature reclaims. Out of the corner of my eye, down the long narrow strip mowed to infinity where a fenceline once ran, I see a large deer guide out of the woods, pause and look my way, and vanish just as soon as it appeared. Is it obscene to find in this place now a feeling of inner peace, to find beauty in the stillness of a grey afternoon? Maybe so. But I feel it.
Back inside, Bernd is talking to our group at the Exhibit where the evacuation transports from the exchange camps are outlined with the photographs of Major Benjamin and Dr. Gross. He explains that between April 6 and 9th, 6700 men, women and children were evacuated on three transports. The “lucky” train was liberated by the Americans on April 13. Friday. One train did make it to the destination of Theresienstadt, where the occupants were liberated the last day of the war. On April 23rd, the third train was liberated by the Red Army at Trobitz, across the Elbe.

Bernd Horstmann, Custodian of the Book of Names, Matthew Rozell, History Teacher, July 5, 2013. Bergen Belsen, Evacuation transports exhibit.

Bernd Horstmann, Custodian of the Book of Names, Matthew Rozell, History Teacher, July 5, 2013. Bergen Belsen, Evacuation transports exhibit.

Bernd explains that as the exhibition was being planned, his colleague Christian discovered the photographs that I had been given by the Dr. Gross to place on my website. It altered their vision of the exhibition and he described their excitement as the corroborated the testimony of the soldiers with the photographs. Yes, this is the Farsleben transport. Yes, this is the transport that the Americans called “The Train Near Magdeburg”. My fellow teachers ask questions, and learn more about the exchange camp. They are putting faces to the victims when they see the pictures. I am happy to share this experience with them. I am here, and I am seeing it for the first time with them. They are part of this experience, at our first major stop on the trip. Later, on the bus, some are excited to see the Benjamin photo in the official Bergen Belsen guidebook. In my being caught up in the presence of the moment, I neglected to purchase one for myself, but there it is. I was not even aware of it.
Back out to the camp. The solemn monuments marking the mass graves. 1000 Tote. One thousand DSC00490dead. 2500 Tote. Two thousand five hundred dead. And on and on, elevated mass graves. On to the commemoration room. Candles are lit, stones are placed, the prayers are recited in Hebrew and English, led by Pauline, the only other New Yorker on the trip with me. We are all moved. I think of Carrol Walsh, the tank commander who led me to this story, the liberator who did not want to be called a hero, or even a liberator. His own memorial service is today, half a world away, but I am here in this place to remember him as well. It is altogether fitting and proper. And perhaps it is also something destined to be.

This evening we depart from Hannover to Berlin. It is pretty crazy and unsettling at the Friday evening platform. 27 people have to run for the train, as the track has changed, with hundreds of others. Our original seats are taken, so we have to find other due to a mixup. But we do not lose anyone, and as I settle in next to a kind stranger, made welcome, I notice our station stops along the way- Brunswick. Magdeburg. We are roughly following the route of the train, and the 30th Infantry Division in 1945. What take us 35 minutes to cover, takes 6 nights and 7 days in April 1945.
Today was also something destined to be, the culmination of something incredible I am still trying to figure it all out- but this trip is helping me to place in proper context the elements of the greatest crime in the history of the world. As we leave this place of obscene beauty and peace, I think of  the I think of  the survivor’s words:

Remember Me.

Remember. Bergen Belsen, July 5, 2013.

Remember. Bergen Belsen, July 5, 2013.

Read Full Post »

2 NY vets of Edson’s Raiders recall WWII battles.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 26, 2013|

My boys. Thanks to my friend Chris Carola at the AP and Senator Little’s office for recognizing them while they were still with us.

2 NY vets of Edson’s Raiders recall WWII battles

By CHRIS CAROLA

— May. 26 3:38 PM EDT

In this Wednesday, May 22, 2013 photo, World War II veterans Bob Addison, left, and Jerry West pose for a photo, in Glens Falls, N.Y. Addison and West share more than a longtime friendship. They share some of the same memories of bloody battles fought on Pacific islands while serving with an elite Marine Corps unit that was the forerunnner of today's U.S. Special Forces. Living just miles apart, the two men are among the last surviving members of the original Marine Raider battalions that were the first American ground troops to attack Japanese-held territory. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

In this Wednesday, May 22, 2013 photo, World War II veterans Bob Addison, left, and Jerry West pose for a photo, in Glens Falls, N.Y. Addison and West share more than a longtime friendship. They share some of the same memories of bloody battles fought on Pacific islands while serving with an elite Marine Corps unit that was the forerunnner of today’s U.S. Special Forces. Living just miles apart, the two men are among the last surviving members of the original Marine Raider battalions that were the first American ground troops to attack Japanese-held territory. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

Gerald West held the laminated sheet of paper fellow World War II combat veteran Robert Addison pulled from an old briefcase and perused the 300-plus names listed under the words, “Lest We Forget.”

“I knew quite a few of those guys,” said West, 93, who made the short drive to Addison’s home 45 miles north of Albany recently to reminisce about their wartime service with the legendary Edson’s Raiders, an elite Marine Corps unit that was the forerunnner of today’s U.S. Special Forces.

The document Addison keeps among his wartime mementos and literature lists the names of members of the 1st Marine Raider Battalion who died while fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific. Addison and West are among the dwindling number of Edson’s Raiders still alive. Out of an original roster of about 900 men, fewer than 150 are believed to survive, according to Bruce Burlingham, historian for U.S. Marine Raider Association.

Dubbed Edson’s Raiders after their colorful, red-haired commander, Col. Merritt “Red Mike” Edson, the unit was the first U.S. ground force to attack Japan-held territory after Pearl Harbor. Landing on Tulagi in the Solomon Islands in August 1942, they beat the larger 1st Marine Division’s arrival on nearby Guadalcanal by an hour.

https://i0.wp.com/tsealey.net/thegunny/gfx/raiders.jpgThe 1st and 2nd Raider battalions, formed just days apart in February 1942, were the first commando-style units in the American military, predating the creation of the U.S. Army Rangers by four months. Trained in jungle warfare and hand-to-hand combat, the Raiders’ leatherneck pride paired with a pirate’s attitude was reflected in their distinctive battalion patch: a white death’s head skull in a red diamond, set against a blue background with five white stars representing the Southern Cross constellation.

Addison, an Alliance, Ohio, native, and West, who grew up outside Glens Falls, both fought at Tulagi and later on Guadalcanal, where Edson’s Raiders earned their vaunted place in American military lore for anchoring the thinly stretched Marine defenses that decimated Japanese forces during successive nighttime assaults in September 1942.

Fighting from positions separated by a few hundred yards along high ground near the island’s airfield, Addison and West helped defend what became known as Bloody Ridge _ but that the Marines called “Edson’s Ridge.” They wouldn’t learn until much later that the fight was considered a turning point that started the U.S. on its island-hopping road to victory in the Pacific.

“In combat, you only know what’s going on in your little world,” West said.

Edson was awarded the Medal of Honor for his front-line leadership during the battle, during which his Raiders suffered more than 250 killed and wounded. Bigger, bloodier battles awaited, but Edson’s Ridge and the Raiders hold a special place among leathernecks of all generations, according to Beth Crumley, a historian with the U.S. Marine Corps History Division.

“Anybody who has taken an interest in the history of the corps, they’re going to know the story about Edson and they’re going to know about the Raiders and know about the Battle of Edson’s Ridge,” she said.

After the Raiders’ next campaign on the island of New Georgia in the summer of 1943, Addison and West were sent back to the U.S. Addison was attending college as part of an officers program, and West was in Guam preparing for the invasion of Japan when the war ended.

They went their separate ways and didn’t get reacquainted until the early 1960s, when Addison moved to Glens Falls to become athletic director at a new community college. He ran into West at a Sears store where West was working, and they’ve remained close friends ever since.

“They were America’s first elite force unit and showed future units like the U.S. Army Special Forces what could be done with a handful of determined, well-trained, well-armed troops against a determined enemy,” said Robert A. Buerlein, co-author of “Our Kind of War: Illustrated Saga of the U.S. Marine Raiders of World War II.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/2-ny-vets-edsons-raiders-recall-wwii-battles

********************************************

Gerry West and Bob Addison, U.S. Marine “Edson’s Raiders” World War II veterans, honored in Albany

By Betty Little
Posted by Betty Little on Tuesday, May 21st, 2013
Gerry West and Bob Addison, World War II veterans who served in the same elite U.S. Marines unit and have remained lifelong friends, were inducted into the New York State Senate Veterans Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Albany today.

Gerry West and Bob Addison, World War II veterans who served in the same elite U.S. Marines unit and have remained lifelong friends, were inducted into the New York State Senate Veterans Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Albany today.

Senator Betty Little nominated Addison of Glens Falls and West of Fort Edward.

“These two soldiers were among the first Americans to engage the Japanese in combat less than a year after Pearl Harbor,” said Senator Little.  “They were specially selected and trained to serve in the First Marine Raider Battalion, called Edson’s Raiders, and fought in critical and victorious battles on Guadalcanal.

“After the war, they returned home, started families and careers, but never lost touch and remained lifelong friends.  They are among the few remaining Edson’s Raiders and their bond is unique.  It was a wonderful honor for me to have them here today, along with their family and friends, to share their story and see them receive this well-deserved recognition.”

West and Addison were suggested to Senator Little by Hudson Falls history teacher Matthew Rozell.  Rozell is in the process of writing a series of articles on World War II, based on class archives of interviews, for the Washington County Historical Society Journal.  The following are excerpts from a part of the series entitled “Recording the Voices of World War II – From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay”:

On September 14th, 1942, first light at Guadalcanal revealed over a thousand Japanese dead on the ridge.  Outnumbered five to one, for two nights the Raiders held on against Japanese shelling by sea and Imperial troops, and the battle became legendary in Marine Corps history.

            West recalls: “Most of us just refer to it as Bloody Ridge.  We had 50% casualties that night…two men in our battalion received the Congressional Medal of Honor and there were thirteen Navy Crosses awarded to men in our battalion just for that one battle, which is unheard of.”

            Suppressed from the public at the time, more than 7,000 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors would die in the six month Guadalcanal campaign.  Japanese losses were much higher.

            Bob Addison: “They called it Hell Island, the Japanese, because they had to live out in the jungles…They had lost over 26,000 men.”

            Only a handful of the original Marine Raiders are left.  Addison and West survived to return home, marry, and raise children.  Seventy one years later, their friendship endures.

The New York State Veterans’ Hall of Fame was created to honor and recognize outstanding veterans from the Empire State who have distinguished themselves both in military and civilian life.  The Hall of Fame can be accessed online at www.nysenate.gov/honoring-our-veterans .

Read Full Post »

Marine Raiders to be honored by NYS Senate.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 20, 2013|

Gerald West
Born: 1919
Served: U.S. Marines 1940-1957
U.S. Army 1957-1962
Residence: Fort Edward, New York
Nominated by Matthew Rozell, History teacher

Robert Addison
Born: 1922
Served: U.S. Marines 1942-1946; 1950-51
Residence: Glens Falls, New York
Nominated by Matthew Rozell, History teacher

Photo Credit: Robert H. Miller Gerry West and Bob Addison, Spring, 2011.

Photo Credit: Robert H. Miller
Gerry West and Bob Addison, Spring, 2011.

On May 21, 2013, local World War II veterans Gerald West and Robert Addison will be honored in a ceremony for the New York State Senate Veterans’ Hall of Fame. They were nominated by Senator Betty Little at the suggestion of Hudson Falls history teacher Matthew Rozell, whose students had interviewed these men several times.

Mr. Rozell is in the process of writing a series of articles on World War II for the Washington County Historical Society Journal utilizing the class archives of interviews. The following narrative is condensed from the upcoming Fall release of the Journal, which will publish Part II  (of 4) in the Pacific series entitled “Recording the Voices of World War II-From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay.”

******************************************************************

 In this installment of an ongoing series, my students and I have pieced together narrative voices of local residents and their friends that show the enthusiasm for the war effort.  Maybe more importantly, their recollections amplify other points essential to an understanding of World War II, but often overlooked.  In the study of this war, we are tempted to both teach and learn the history as if the way things turned out was somehow preordained − as if, from the outset, it was a foregone conclusion the Allies would win the war.  Because we know how events turned out, we read the history with a sense of inevitability (as several historians have pointed out[1]).  Nothing could be further from the truth.

By talking to persons who lived through these troubled times, my students and I gained insight into the urgent, uncertain, confused way many events actually unfolded.   We confronted particularly – through the stories of local men and women − the nation’s unpreparedness in the first years of the Pacific War, beginning with the initial limited response to the Japanese attacks at Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines.  While military planners in Washington debated, numbers of local men would fight to survive in vicious jungle fighting.  Indeed, it was the incredible actions of these men, against overwhelming odds, which would shape events and force policymakers in Washington, D. C., to take notice.

******************************************************************

 Six months after Pearl Harbor, American naval forces won a decisive engagement at the Battle of Midway (June 4−7, 1942) At this time, advance elements of General Alexander Vandegrift’s 1st Marine Division were gathering in New Zealand, with no American offensive action planned until early 1943.  However, soon after Midway, intelligence showed a Japanese air base under construction at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.  If finished, the Japanese noose encircling Australia would be complete and any Allied counteroffensive very difficult.  A U. S. amphibious landing was needed immediately, and on a scale not attempted since the World War I Allied debacle at Gallipoli (1915) − and with much less time to plan.  “I could not believe it,” General Vandegrift would later say of this plan.[2]

Vandegrift had within his command a special unit, under formation only since February 1942, the “1st Marine Raider Battalion,” which would play a key role in the ultimate U. S. success at Guadalcanal.  Schooled by veterans of Marine operations of the 1920s and 1930s in Central America and China, 900 specially selected young men formed a lightly-armed, mobile commando unit able to operate in sub-equatorial jungle − the vanguard for larger troop landings to follow.  Named “Edson’s Raiders” after their Colonel “Red Mike” Edson, the unit would earn combat honors unparalleled in Marine Corps history[3] in 18 weeks of violent engagements at Guadalcanal.

Of the 900 original Raiders, two local veterans interviewed by our class belonged to this elite group and currently reside in  Senator Little’s 45th Senate District.

Gerry West (R) shown training with Marine Gunner Angus H. Goss(L). When Japanese holed up in caves, the demolition platoon attached TNT charges to ends of poles and fashioned the techniques needed to root out the remaining defenders on the island of Tulagi in the first American ground offensive against Japanese troops in WW II. Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 55268

Gerry West (R) shown training with Marine Gunner Angus H. Goss (L). When Japanese holed up in caves, the demolition platoon attached TNT charges to ends of poles and fashioned the techniques needed to root out the remaining defenders on the island of Tulagi in the first American ground offensive against Japanese troops in WW II. Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 55268

Gerry West grew up in Fort Anne, and like many other during the Depression, decided to enlist in the Marine Corps following high school, and would remain in the military until 1962. In fact, he was already a Marine when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor. “I’ll never forget it. I was sitting in a barracks in Quantico, Virginia. I had the duty that weekend, and there were about ten of us there listening to the Washington Redskins football game which had just started…and something like 1:05 they broke in with the announcement saying that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.” Robert Addison of Glens Falls, originally from Ohio, spent 29 years as Athletic Director of Adirondack Community College.  He also recalls the day: “The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on my nineteenth birthday. A month later I found myself in the Marine Corps in a time compressed boot camp…When I was just about ready to finish boot camp, they were filling up and forming this Raider battalion.”

Addison made the cut and was interviewed by a Marine captain who told him the Raiders would be the cream of the Marine Corps, but also warned their mission would likely be “first in and last out.”[4]  Addison accepted the challenge and was assigned to a mortar squad in the fledgling Raiders.  More training followed.  Some days they marched, fully equipped, dozens of miles in the day, only to turn around and re-navigate the same terrain, in the dark, through swamps and across rivers.

Bob Addison: “When we got into the Raider Battalion, then we really got into the force.  On a Saturday morning, we would go on a 22-mile, full-pack, forced march − you know, in the morning − and then they give us liberty in the afternoon . . . And Edson was known for getting people in good physical condition.  He was the type of guy you would follow him anyplace, because what he would do when we were on these forced marches, he would stop and watch everybody go by, and he would walkie-talkie [to the head of the column], and they would hold up, and he would start [jogging past the men] double-time up [to the head of the column] . . .  When we came in, at the barracks, he would stand there and watch every man go by and give compliments to us − you know, “good job, good job.” That’s the type of leader he was.  Everybody practically worshipped him.  He was quite a leader.”[5]

The Raiders embarked on a cross-country train journey and were then, for two weeks, carried by reconverted World War I destroyers across the South Pacific to Samoa. There, in conditions of hot, muggy weather and frequent rain, training continued with cross-country hikes in a mountain terrain of steep ridges and slippery trails, often at night.  Sometimes pushed from 5:00 A. M. until 10:00 or 12:00 P. M., the men survived on skimpy rations, while also completing a training schedule that included practice landings in inflatable boats, Judo, bayonet combat, first aid, stalking, and demolition.[6]

Eight months after Pearl Harbor to the day, the Marines landed in combat. To secure Guadalcanal, the Raiders were assigned to take the neighboring island of Tulagi, where they would be up against the best of the Japanese combat forces, the Rikusentai  or Japanese “Special Naval Landing Forces.”  Coming in on Higgins Boats in the morning hours of August 7, 1942, the Raiders would clash for three days in vicious fighting, encountering hitherto-unknown Japanese cave bunkers plus their enemies’ sniper actions, night-fighting, and willingness to fight to the death.  The Raiders then conducted raids on Japanese camps on Guadalcanal, as enemy forces ere being reinforced at night, every night, while the US Navy left the scene.

From Addison scrapbook. Bob is at far left. ((Derek Pruitt/Post Star.)

From Addison scrapbook. Bob is at far left. ((Derek Pruitt/Post Star.)

Addison was trained as a mortar man and West was a demotions expert and tapped as a machine-gunner in the critical battles at Guadalcanal, where the Japanese were developing an airfield to support their attack on Australia. The Marines captured the airfield and the Raiders pulled back to high ground overlooking it to defend it. If the Ridge fell, Guadalcanal would fall; and if the ‘Canal fell, Australia might be next. A vicious battle for the high ground would ensue.

West recalls: “They did not get through us, if they had gotten through, they would’ve had the airstrip back. Most of us just refer to it as Bloody Ridge. We had 50% casualties that night…”

On September 14th, 1942, first light at Guadalcanal revealed over a thousand Japanese dead on the ridge.  Outnumbered five to one, for two nights the Raiders held on against Japanese shelling by sea and Imperial troops, and the battle has become legendary in Marine Corps history.

Battle of Edson's Ridge Painting by USMC artist who was at Guadalcanal.

Battle of Edson’s Ridge Painting by USMC artist who was at Guadalcanal.

West continues: “It was probably the decisive battle of the whole campaign. In the Battle of Bloody Ridge, just to give you an idea, two men in our battalion received the Congressional Medal of Honor and there were thirteen Navy Crosses awarded to men in our battalion just for that one battle, which is unheard of.”

Suppressed from the public at the time, more than 7000 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors would die in the six month Guadalcanal campaign. Japanese losses were much higher. By the time the last starving and dispirited Japanese troops left in Feb. 1943, further Japanese expansion into the South Pacific was halted.

Bob Addison: “They called it Hell Island, the Japanese, because they had to live out in the jungles… They had lost over 26,000 men. A lot of them died of starvation and diseases… When they left, they left 26,000 behind.”

Only a handful of the original Marine Raiders are left. Addison and West survived to return home, marry, and raise children. Seventy one years later, their friendship endures.

Condensed from the forthcoming Washington County Historical Society Journal.

The Washington County Historical Society Journal is an annual 96 page print publication of the WCHS. The Journal seeks to publish new research into any aspect of the County’s history, and this includes reminiscences and interesting unpublished source materials. All members of the WCHS receive it; for membership information, please visit their website at www.wchs-ny.org.

For more information contact Mr. Rozell at his website, http://teachinghistorymatters.com

[1] William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Boston: Little Brown, 1987) p. 167.

[2] Geoffrey C. Ward & Ken Burns, The War: An Intimate History (NYC: Knopf, 2007) pp. 47−49.

[3] Among them, 24 U. S. Navy ships would be named in honor of individual members of the Battalion before the war was over.  See Col. Joseph H. Alexander, Edson’s Raiders: The First Marine Raider Battalion in World War II (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000) p. 49.

[4] Alexander, op.cit., p. 32.

[5] Merritt “Red Mike” Edson was born just over the border from Washington Co. in Rutland, VT, in 1897. Retiring as a USMC Brigadier General, he returned to Vermont and became the first Commissioner of the Vermont State Police.

[6] Alexander, pp. 60−63.

************************************************************

From YNN News…

Bob and Jerry 5-21-13. YNN News, Albany, NY

Bob and Jerry 5-21-13. YNN News, Albany, NY

ALBANY, N.Y. — The souls who carry heavy memories from war were thanked in Albany on Tuesday for bearing the burden of our freedom.

World War II Veteran and Newburgh resident Warren Craig described, “We got hit 57 times. And I ended up jumping into the ocean at 12 o’clock at night, swimming with the sharks and the enemy.”

Craig enlisted when he was 17-years-old.

Fifty-four men and women have been added to the New York State Senate Veterans’ Hall of Fame for what they’ve done and kept doing over the years.

Senator Greg Ball explained, “Their heart never took the uniform off. And they continue to serve for the rest of their life.”

These men and women’s lives would then never be the same. Among them are Capt. Gerry West and Sgt. Robert Addison, who both served in the United States Marine Corp. during World War II. The two were part of the Edson’s Raiders, the original 900 members of a commando unit, and survived the battles of the Pacific Theater after Pearl Harbor.

“The bloody ridge on Guadalcanal. We were both there. It brings back a lot of memories,” said Addison, who now lives in Glens Falls.

West said, “The bad battles, like Bloody Ridge. You never forget something like that. We still talk about it and things we never forget.”

West resides in Fort Edward now.

“We’ve known each other for 71 years. Since February of ’42, so what would that be? 71 years,” he confirmed.

Now neighbors in the North Country, the two Edson’s Raiders are still right by each others’ side.

“Well, I just live down the road from him, so we’ve kept in touch all the time,” said Addison.

These legacies are once again being remembered and passed onto the younger generation.

“I grab a hold of fellas that don’t know what to do and take them with me, to get them started,” said Craig. “There’s so much opportunity out there.”

Troy native Daniel Honsinger, a veteran of the Vietnam War, said, “God bless America, that’s all.”

For more information on the Veterans’ Hall of Fame, visit www.nysenate.gov .

Read Full Post »

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslie Meisels is 86.

Leslie Meisels turned 68 last month.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The horror is ungraspable.

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

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

Over six days, the train progressed only 135 kilometres.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

by Catherine Porter 

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

Read Full Post »

Obsession.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 1, 2013|

Someone recently, I think it was a journalist, exhibited a sense of wonderment about my project, the one where my interviews with World War II veterans led to the unification of them with the hundreds of Holocaust survivors whom they saved. He was excited and mentioned that it was my “obsession” with this story that led to so many reunions and magical events with liberators and survivors, and the children and grandchildren.

That gave me pause.

I do spend a lot of time working on this project. It’s my baby, after all. And yes, I’ve taken tons of risks to bring it to the public and the students at large. When these large conferences are being planned, profuse amounts of bullets are sweated. Once I’ve inked the contracts, will the guests come? What if no one shows up? Will my guests get along, will they stay healthy while they are here? Will the teenagers behave with these older people, be respectful? Thank goodness for my support network, especially Tara, Mary, and Lisa, my fellow teachers, and not in the least my family. I tore a lot of hair out.

Merriam’s defines obsession as “a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling; broadly : compelling motivation <an obsession with profits>”.

I’ll admit to preoccupation: “the absorption of the attention or intellect; something that preoccupies or engrosses the mind: “<Money was their chief preoccupation>”. Though I can’t say it is about money. I don’t have any on hand to speak of as a result, but that is not the point.

I’ll admit to compelling motivation, but again, I don’t think it is over profits, unless we decide to discuss how my own life has been enriched by witnessing the enriching of others’ lives. It is safe to say that I have profited emotionally. It is also gratifying to see the reactions of the students and the deeper understanding that they seem to internalize as they become the new witnesses.

But not obsession. Obsession channels unhealthiness. Especially when you are dealing with the Holocaust.

The fact is that once it is apparent that an unopened door is in front of you, you can decide to turn the knob, or not. When you are exploring an old house, you can wonder what lay behind that door, or not. You enter a new room, and sometimes there are new doors to open. Then you begin to connect the dots, as all these streams of information begin to blend into a larger stream of new understanding. You are excited, because no one   has charted these streams to the headwaters of understanding in quite this way. There have been similar journeys but no one has actually been here before.

You begin to see things with a clarity that might even approach the sensation of an out-of-body experience. The events of nearly 70 years ago are unfolding in my head, now, in real time.

Sometimes you get lost. As you become immersed in your own new stream of consciousness, the outside world takes a back seat. You are not really lost, but you have to keep the “real world” at arm’s length while you work out the path. This can be exceedingly difficult and might explain why it is 0230 as I write this.

I guess being labeled obsessive bugs me a little bit. “Passionately curious” is good. A teacher’s dream is to encounter the “passionately curious” student. I’ve been blessed with a few in my career.

Maybe if you are a parent you want a teacher who is still curious about the subject they teach as well.

But not obsessed.

Read Full Post »

Holocaust survivors, veterans gather at DC museum

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

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

Frank this morning at the Museum – P. Fredlake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Full Post »

Survivors will help mark Holocaust museum anniversary.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 28, 2013|

As the museum turns 20, officials understand that the demise of those who survived the prison camps as children means looking backward in a different way.

30th ID Colors, Capitol Rotunda, April 11, 2013

30th ID Colors, Capitol Rotunda, April 11, 2013

Tonight is the Nation Tribute Dinner. Frank, Leslie and Elisabeth are there- two survivors and their actual liberator. Tomorrow they get interviewed near the 30th Infantry Division Flag, recently installed in the main foyer of the Museum as a liberating division. About time. I nearly cried when I saw it paraded into the Capitol Rotunda for the Days of Remembrance  commemoration this year. First time! I really think the project helped get the 30th on the recognition radar screen…here is a good article, found on USA Today.

WASHINGTON — The adult survivors of the Holocaust are mostly gone now, and those who survived as children — and were old enough at the time to remember their ordeals — are now in their 70s and 80s.

It won’t be long before no eyewitnesses remain.

That’s why, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum marks its 20th anniversary Monday with more than 750 survivors, museum officials are calling it one of the last large gatherings of those who managed to escape Hitler’s death machine.

For those who have dedicated themselves to teaching future generations about the Holocaust and its victims, the demise of the survivors means looking backward in a different way — a way that no longer includes people looking others straight in the face and recounting what they saw and what they lived.

You can read all the documentation of the Holocaust in the world, said Diane Saltzman, director of survivor affairs at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “but hearing somebody’s voice, sitting across the table or across the room from a human being, there’s no true substitute.”

Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, wants his classes to understand this.

“I tell my students annually that they have a special responsibility,” he said. “They are the last generation that will be able to say that they personally knew survivors of the Holocaust. It is a big change, just like it was when the last Civil War veteran passed from the scene.”

The Holocaust, now “perceived history,” will become “received” history, Sarna said. The challenge is that it doesn’t recede from memory.

Holocaust educators take heart in the many institutions and younger people committed to ensuring that future generations will know about the 6 million Jews who died; of the concentration camps, gas chambers and crematoria set up to carry out Hitler’s “Final Solution”; and of the 5 million Roma (Gypsies), gay people and others murdered because the Nazis deemed them, like the Jews, unworthy of life.

That’s the mission of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, said Saltzman, which has hosted some 35 million visitors since it opened just off the National Mall in 1993. The institution is full of audio and video testimony from survivors, artifacts from their lives before and after they were sent to concentration camps, and films and diaries that document the genocide.

“The museum stands as that eyewitness going forward,” Saltzman said. “We are the repository of all that evidence, and all of those memories.”

From the Washington museum to Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem to smaller museums around the world, these institutions preserve history that will soon no longer be passed on firsthand. So, too, does Holocaust literature, from Anne Frank’s famous diary to Night, by survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who will give the keynote speech at the Washington museum’s anniversary Monday, alongside former president Bill Clinton.

The Shoah Foundation, based at the University of Southern California, has videotaped testimony from more than 51,000 survivors since film director Steven Spielberg started the project in 1994, when there were about 350,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide.

Curriculum programs in schools introduce children in the U.S. and elsewhere to the Holocaust, and these programs will continue, even when survivors aren’t part of them anymore.

Norman Frajman, 83, thinks of that day. He was 10 years old when World War II began, and has sharp memories of life in the Warsaw Ghetto and of the Majdanek death camp in eastern Poland, where his mother and younger sister died. All told, he lost 126 members of his immediate and extended family.

“I probably wouldn’t remember what I had for breakfast, but I remember all that happened to me during the carnage,” said Frajman, who now lives in Boynton Beach, Fla., and has been sharing his testimony with schoolchildren for more than 30 years.

But not with young children. “The atrocities are indescribable. I can’t address anyone at the elementary school level,” he said. “It’s too graphic.”

For all the graphic details available from survivors, and primary and secondary texts and film, Holocaust denial still thrives on the Internet and in many parts of the world where anti-Semitism has strong roots.

Even in the presence of Holocaust survivors, there are people who insist the genocide never happened, Sarna said. The hope, when there are no more survivors, is that the museums and the video archives will make it “impossible for most people to accept the word of the deniers.”

In the meantime, as long as he is able, Frajman will tell his story and teach about the Holocaust in hopes of preventing another one. “Yesterday it was directed against the Jews. Tomorrow it could be against Christians, the next day against Muslims — unless people heed and listen,” he said.

But he is optimistic that his words and those of other survivors will resonate long after he is gone.

“Judging by today’s young people that I encounter when I go to schools to speak, we are in for a better tomorrow,” Frajman said. “They listen. They are very perceptive. They take it to heart.”

Read Full Post »

Three American Candles.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 7, 2013| 2 Comments »

I just got home from a Yom Hashoah event, Holocaust Remembrance, that was pretty intense.

Three American candles.You know that when folks come up after you speak and squeeze your hands that you have made a favorable impression. Teachers in the audience come up to say they feel inspired.

But  they know that it is not about me.

I let the liberator and the survivor do the talking (see link below), then spoke about our obligations as the new witnesses to carry on the story.

Of course the event is about those who perished. But we must listen while we can to the survivors and become the new witnesses.

For those of you who came out, I re-post the narrative here-scroll down to the bottom for the NPR story, in 3 parts, from You Tube.   To those of you who may be curious, do it. You don’t even have to watch, just turn it up and listen. Set aside a few moments of time to recall, together, the moment of liberation and the aftermath.

But also remember that if we let the liberator’s final message go by the wayside [part 3], then we have learned nothing. Our kids, our students deserve better. Trust me, if you are an educator, or an educational administrator {my emphasis} puzzled with how to get kids to DO ANYTHING for you, they will respond for you with this, if presented correctly.

And as a final aside, the three candles pictured above, Red, White, and Blue, are for

Major Clarence Benjamin,

Dr. (SGT) George C. Gross, tank commander,

and Judge (SGT) Carrol S. Walsh, tank commander.

I kept alive their stories tonight.

Thanks to survivor Bruria Falik for thinking of this, in addition to the six candles for the millions lost and the candle for the 2nd generation. It was my honor to explain their significance. To those of you who offered your support and feedback, in person or on line, thank you. It is what I kind of need sometimes to know that I am making a difference.

Feel free to leave response!

MR

April 7, 2013

Read Full Post »

I know you are very busy, but please answer my questions.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 27, 2013| 3 Comments »

Soon after liberation, surviving children of the Auschwitz camp walk out of the children’s barracks. Poland, after January 27, 1945. — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Soon after liberation, surviving children of the Auschwitz camp walk out of the children’s barracks. Poland, after January 27, 1945. — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day Soviet troops over ran Auschwitz in 1945. This week I received a note from an Israeli survivor friend, shortly after the passing of one of her liberators, Carrol Walsh. Sara lost over 60 of her family there- and her immediate family was saved only because the day they arrived at Auschwitz, the death machinations were working at full capacity and her transport was rerouted to Belsen. She was liberated on 13 April on the evacuation transport near Farsleben, known here as the Train Near Magdeburg…

In her letter she asks important questions of me. I have responded the best that I could, below.

Dear Matthew,

 We were very sad to hear that Carrol Walsh passed away. Only lately did I get to know him, and he risked his life in order to save ours. It is a pity we did not get to meet more.

I can’t express in words the loving feelings for the young tank commander that for sure always had a smile on his face, and never stopped smiling after we met- 65 years after the victory. I am sure Carrol Walsh made the best out of his life; I was fulfilled to know him and his beautiful family.

I read about his profession in the years of his life. It was interesting to see how much meeting with us affected him.

I thank you for your unusual courage to initiate the exciting meeting [reunion].

I suppose you were very excited for the event you had initiated. Did the idea come in different parts? I am trying to understand the development of your thinking.
When you first wrote to me about the meeting [invitation to the proposed reunion], it was on the day we were released- the 13th of April. I got home after meeting my brothers and celebrating the release [liberation]day. I couldn’t relax, I immediately told all my brothers. I was so happy, as if it was happening again.

The meeting completed a missing part in the picture for me, after all the horrifying things we went through we couldn’t even dream of a miracle like that coming out of the blue.

I cannot go back more to the extermination camps and escort groups because I don’t have the physical nor mental power to do that anymore.

There are questions that bother me.

Are you able to answer them?

Why shouldn’t the world forget and let this be over?  

A. So, some people do want to forget. Others will say that it did not happen. For those reasons, it must never be forgotten. This is the biggest crime in the history of the world.

As Walsh states, how could humanity have stood by and let that happen?

Does my work, the hard work I do, do anything against the forgetting?

A.The most impressionable minds in the world are those of the youth. It is they who the Nazis “educated”; it made it easier for the crimes to be committed. This is why they must hear now.

The work that you, and I do, has an impression. I hope to continue this work after you must slow down. Please remember that.

 

You are a historian, should the memory be kept?

A.The memory must be kept. As educators it is our duty to keep it alive. We must fight those who trivialize or denigrate its importance.

Is there a proper way to keep the memory?

A.There is no one way except to be open to the discussion of humanity and how humans could do this to one another. We must also bear in mind however, that the soldiers who helped the suffering to new life bore their own pains in doing so, yet also made a choice to redeem humanity. Some did not sleep soundly for years.

I think this is so, and also must not be forgotten. The war brought out the most evil in the world. But I think it also revealed some goodness in the form of the soldiers who liberated or otherwise cared for the victims.

Who should be documenting everything, the “victim” or the “aggressor”?

A.The aggressor fades from memory. New generations asks questions. It is true that some are bothered by the questions. But the young will always be curious and want to know- is this a stain on the German people? I know some Germans today who work very hard to keep the memory alive, as you also do.

The victims give the testimony. This is all they can do. But it is the evidence of the crime, and one that new generations must work with. That is why your work is so important.

Who is in charge of making the conclusions?

A.I would say that institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem are the world leaders in this area. I have been trained, well, I should hope, by the USHMM. I do not know enough about the German institutions but I hope to raise enough funds to travel to the camps and study there this summer.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »