World War II | Teaching History Matters

Posts Tagged ‘World War II’

Moving through the Sudetenland, to Prague.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Holocaust, Holocaust Education, Prague, Sudetenland, teaching history matters, World War II on July 9, 2014|

A year ago I took one of the most transformative journeys of my life, with 24 fellow educators, to study the Holocaust and the Jewish resistance to it, in Washington, DC, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. I kept an extensive diary and took tons of photographs. And contrary to many assumptions, it was a journey that led to profound understandings about life, not death. For the next several days, I have decided to go back and retrace my steps and try to process what unfolded for me. Not weighty tomes, but maybe a picture and a note from the diary.

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July 8 and 9. Day began with packing- we are leaving Berlin for Prague at midday. This morning we went to Tiergartenstrasse 4, for the exhibit, discussed in a previous post. After a stop at the US Embassy we went to the Holocaust memorial for the Roma and Sinti, in the shadow of the Reichstag.

Holocaust memorial for the Roma and Sinti. Berlin.

In the reflection of the sign above, you can see the slabs representing destroyed communities through Europe.

At the train station, we begin our journey to the south, the Czech Republic. The train meanders past Magdeburg again, and alongside the Elbe River, passes through the Sudetenland.

Sudetenland by Alan Bush.

Sudetenland, shortly after the sell out at the Munich Conference in 1938. Some excited. Some not.

Then we reach Prague, have a tour of the city.

Prague.

Hitler was here on March 15, 1939, and the flags came out after full annexation.

Review in Prague. During the war.

Prague by Alan Bush.

The was one of the last cities liberated by the Allies-the Red Army- and it is important to note that it was relatively unscathed by bombing during the war. However, there is a lot of Holocaust history to be encountered. But first, to the Jewish synagogues, and burial grounds, that attested to the hundreds year old vibrant presence.

We were not here long enough to do extensive touring, but it is a beautiful city and highly recommended for any would-be European traveler. There are some fascinating tours and here is an interesting article on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, in his capacity as the “Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia”, whom we met in a previous post at the Wannsee Villa. I would have like to have toured that site.

Now the tour continues to Terezin, or Theresienstadt. I will be at the site where the “Train Near Magdeburg” was destined to arrive-but never did, thanks to the US Army. But why there? We will see.

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Hiding in plain sight-Sachsenhausen.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged concentration camps, hiding in plain sight, Holocaust, Holocaust Education, humanity, Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen, teaching history matters, World War II on July 7, 2014|

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We followed our visit to Ravensbruck with a visit to Sachsenhausen, though Sachsenhausen was known earlier by the name of the nearby town as Oranienburg, the model SS camp built between 1936 and 1938, an SS military training facility. Here also was the headquarters for the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, the closest to the center of power, about 40 km outside Berlin.

Classroom at Sachsenhausen.

Our historian/guide at Sachsenhausen, Martin S.

We have another passionate young German historian-Martin S. In March 1933, Oranienburg became one of the first KZ-Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp. Due to its proximity to the capital of the Reich, local political opponents were held here. As a simple matter of natural progression, the Gestapo would also shoot political prisoners here in the “shooting pit.”

The shooting pit at Sachsenhausen.

After the invasion of the USSR, Sachsenhausen was used to murder Soviet POWs as well. In the infamous”neck shot facility”, over 10,000 were murdered in ten weeks in 1941.

Shooting barracks at Sachsenhausen, for Soviet POWs.

Here, crematoria were developed, and vast shipments of stolen property from the East were later unloaded and warehoused. A brick factory was opened, making bricks for “GERMANIA” to be used in the new Reich construction in Berlin. Life expectancy there was six to eight weeks.

Here, also, scientists and engineers tested gassing vans and facilities. Doctors experimented on live subjects. Always testing. And as we know, major corporations had their hands in it as well, profiting from the slave labor that left the camp each day and were paraded through the surrounding community.

After 1936, authorities toned down the visibility/profile of the camp, due to the sinister application of state policy. But again, nearly 200,000 persons passed through the camp gates. Is it hiding in plain sight?

Or do we, as neighbors, simply turn away?

And, nearly eighty years on, why do American educators spend a good chunk of their “vacation” absorbing such new knowledge?

The persons on this trip know why.

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The butcher’s son- Ravensbruck.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged concentration camps, Holocaust, Holocaust Education, Ravensbruck, teaching history matters, World War II on July 7, 2014|

Ravensbruck.

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We have visited a lot of sites in Germany since Bergen Belsen-in Berlin, the Wannsee Villa, where preliminary plans for the “Final Solution ” were signed off on after a one day conference, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of the city, the Reichsbahn train platform, Track 17, where the Jews of Berlin were deported almost everyday for nearly two and a half years. We also visited Ravensbruck and Sachenhausen.

Ravensbruck.

Ravensbruck is a couple of hours north of Berlin, in the former East Germany. It is notable for many reasons, probably first that it was a camp for women, and also a training faculty for SS camp guards-3500 women guards were trained here, and about 500 were in service. 130,000 women prisoners passed through here, and towards the end of the war, another 20,000 men. No barracks are standing today, the houses for the SS leadership remain just outside the camp wall, where they lived with their families. Each day the camp gates would open and thousands of prisoners would stream out into the community for their slave labor assignments. Kind of hard to hide it from the kids. I suppose the attitude was that it was difficult, distasteful work, but the kids had to realized that it had to be done for the wonderful world that they were creating for the children’s future.

Immediately after the war the barracks were dismantled and given to refugees who had fled the Eastern

Matthias H our guide. Photo by Alan Bush.

Reich as it collapsed. Some are still used as houses today. The SS women guard barracks is used as a youth hostel education center today. They have a program where survivors interact with the kids for about 4 days, and sleep here at night. Our guide is the historian Matthias H. at the Gedenkstatte (Memorial). He appears to be in his early 40s and is passionate and knowledgeable, as are all of the German historians I have met thus far. Here are some of his observations that strike me the most:

In his opinion, the majority of Germans supported the master race theory. What disturbs him today is that in his opinion, few Germans today seem conscious of this. It is a very complex topic. The historians talk about the mass crimes, and in Matthias’ words, they work on thin ice. The responses range from some people wanted to know more- after all, many of them learned nothing about it from their teachers, many of whom were bystanders or even perpetrators. Some quietly deny the extent-but I have found that as you study it, you learn how vast and almost unbelievable it is in scope. Others, are tired of the topic- “yes, it happened, so what, enough…”

For Matthias, herein lies the greatest danger. It is important to have the past in front of you- NOT in the back of one’s mind, as one moves forward. The lesson may be simply how to “behave” , not just for Germans but for everyone.

Ravensbruck. Prisoners’ gate on left, SS on right.

He walks us through the main camp entrance, where thousands of prisoners would pass everyday, explaining that for years he would avoid the single door entrance that the SS guards used-until one day a survivor he was leading on a tour walked through it, to symbolize her victory at this place.

He notes a few additional stories. Survivors corroborate that when new SS female guard recruits would come for training, initially they do not know how to deal with the new job. Industries wanting slave labor must send their own guard recruits, too. They are not kind, but they do not seem possessed with the will to carry out this abhorrent work. Former prisoners would say that always within about two weeks new staff would have overcome the “cognitive dissonance” that would allow them to do their job without compassion. They become “hardened” and “get over it”.

Book of Names. Faces.

Ravensbruck was built for 3000 prisoners. At its height it held 35,000. 30,000 were killed here. In the beginning the SS does NOT want women with children in the camp. But as more and more territory is overrun, the camp swells. After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, there are hundreds of pregnant women. Some are forced to abort; as numbers well, women give birth and the babies are taken to a “hospital” where they slowly starve to death. The crematorium works nonstop. Ash piles are created and dumped into the nearby lake as the Russians close in. When the camp is overrun by the Red Army, 2000 women and 2000 men, mostly too infirm to be death marched out of the camp, are found, but not before the Germans had installed a small operating gas chamber, where 5000 Hungarian women were murdered in 1944.

I think that the following story resonated the most with me as an educator of young people.

The butcher’s son delivered fresh cuts of meat nearly daily to the SS mess hall, which still stands. Late in life, the old man tells Matthias of his feeling as a young teen-going through the camp gates to deliver the meat, seeing the emaciated and foul smelling prisoners, and believing fully all he has been taught- that these people are indeed subhuman, vermin to be eliminated. It’s true. Just look at them. Just smell them. Disgusting. Everyday it is the same. They even march through the town to the labor sites. Best to keep a distance from them.

It’s the same until one cold morning when a new transport of women arrive-stripped naked, healthy, humiliated, shivering, crying, shocked, trying to cover themselves in the plaza. Now it is his turn for a shock. These are not subhuman, but girls his age and older, in distress.

And they are naked. He has probably never even seen his mother or sister undressed before. And it is at this moment that he realizes that his teachers and the adults in his life are wrong- that what he is witnessing is a crime. And now perhaps sixty years later he unburdens himself.

Finally, a survivor, Annika, recounts that the Scandinavian Red Cross appeared in the weeks before liberation and in the presence of these new people, the women stroke their hair (as it is growing in again after being shorn off) trying to make themselves presentable. As she is evacuated over the Danish border, something strange happens. People are crying at her miserable condition. At every stop, they crowd around tearfully, and want to help… What is this? Traveling through the towns in Germany, she recounts, no one cried. No one helped. To date, says Matthias, no former German perpetrator has shown remorse for his/her wartime behavior.

The bystanders probably included most of the victims’ neighbors and acquaintances, and certainly most of the townspeople where the crimes were perpetrated, of thinking age.

Prisoners on a death march from Dachau move towards the south along the Noerdliche Muenchner street in Gruenwald. German civilians secretly photographed several death marches from the Dachau concentration camp as the prisoners moved slowly through the Bavarian towns of Gruenwald, Wolfratshausen, and Herbertshausen. Few civilians gave aid to the prisoners on the death marches. Germany, April 29, 1945. — KZ Gedenkstaette Dachau. USHMM

But they all knew.

That for me is one of the axioms that will come out on this trip. But, suspending judgment- we were not there ourselves and placed in that position-we have a lot to think about.

But we must think about this too-Hitler never murdered anyone by himself.

The lake at Ravensbruck, where ashes were dumped.

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Wannsee.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Holocaust, Holocaust Education, teaching history matters, Wannsee, Wannsee Conference, Wannsee Villa, World War II on July 6, 2014|

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“Einsatzkommando 12b of Einsatzgruppe D kills Jewish women and children in a pit, Dubossary, Moldova/Transnistria, 14 Sept. 1941.” Imperial War Museum.

A photograph for you to see. I tend to stay away from displaying more graphic images on this blog, but a year ago on this day I was confronted with it, and many others, at the Wannsee Villa outside of Berlin, where the intentionality of the planning of the Holocaust hits you square in the face, as the photograph on the wall above does.

And it is worth noting the date. Eleven weeks after the start of Operation Barbarossa. You see, now that the Soviet Union has been invaded, there are millions more Jews in the path of the genocidal war machine. The Holocaust here was carried out by soldiers with bullets. Entire villages and districts. Over 1.5 million victims. The dirty work gets done, but given the headaches and the bottlenecks, “there has to be a better way”.

Wannsee Villa, July 6, 2013.

Which brings us to this lovely site. At the Villa outside of Berlin, on 20 January 1942, 15 German military and government heads meet for a day to discuss the Jewish problem in euphemisms. As scholars have noted, the Wannsee Conference was not called to decide the fate of European Jews, but to clarify all points regarding their demise.

From the USHMM: “The “Final Solution” was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. At some still undetermined time in 1941, Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder.”

The display where the “table” around which discussions were held at the villa.

“At the time of the Wannsee Conference, most participants were already aware that the National Socialist regime had engaged in mass murder of Jews and other civilians in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union and in Serbia. Some had learned of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and other police and military units, which were already slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Others were aware that units of the German Army and the SS and police were killing Jews in Serbia. None of the officials present at the meeting objected to the Final Solution policy that SS General Reinhard Heydrich announced.”

A number’s man, Heydrich was.

“Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the “Final Solution.” In this figure, he included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom, and the neutral nations (Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey).

Heydrich announced that “during the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival.” (my emphasis)

Nice place to plan and coordinate mass murder of millions.

For a good short essay on the conference, click here. For the actual meeting minutes, click here.

Now we are off to Track 17 in Berlin, to be followed by a visit to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

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Berlin.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Berlin, Brandenburg Gate, history education, Holocaust, Holocaust Education, teaching history matters, World War II on July 6, 2014|

A year ago I took one of the most transformative journeys of my life, with 24 fellow educators, to study the Holocaust and the Jewish resistance to it, in Washington, DC, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. I kept an extensive diary and took tons of photographs. For the next several days, I have decided to go back and retrace my steps and try to process what unfolded for me. Not weighty tomes, but maybe a picture and a note from the diary.

Berlin. We arrived here late in the evening on the 5th from Hannover by rail, and set up headquarters in the Marriott Berlin, which is very nice, for a few days. On the 6th we ventured out by our tour bus to several places of note. Below I will show you the photos I took, and the World War II era context, and help you connect the dots.

The Reichstag.

The Reichstag with its transparent dome, so citizens today can literally look down and see what their legislators are up to. Hmmmm.

The Reichstag in 1945.

Brandenburg Gate. Tourists.

Brandenburg Gate, 1945. Tourists. Of the Soviet persuasion.

Above is the stadium built for the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. Still in use today.

Inside during the Games in 1936. Kinda makes you think a lot about how Hitler and the Nazi party came to power. Don’t forget, no one is forcing these good citizens to make the salute. Exhibit A: The power of nationalism, and charisma.

Olympic Stadium from the tower.

I know that guy…and so much for painting with too broad a brush.

reviewing stands outside the stadium proper.

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“Belsen! I think they had been in Belsen.”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 30th Infantry Division, 743rd Tank Battalion, Anne Frank, Belsen, Bergen Belsen, Bergen Belsen Memorial, Carrol Walsh, concentration camp, history education, Holocaust, Holocaust Education, Holocaust survivor-liberator reunion, Matthew Rozell, Power of Teaching, Train Near Magdeburg, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, World War II, World War II Living History Project on July 5, 2014| 1 Comment »

A year ago I took one of the most transformative journeys of my life, with 24 fellow educators, to study the Holocaust and the Jewish resistance to it, in Washington, DC, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. I kept an extensive diary and took tons of photographs. For the next several days, I have decided to go back and retrace my steps and try to process what unfolded for me. Not weighty tomes, but maybe a picture and a note from the diary.

Bergen Belsen on July 5, 2013.

“Belsen! I think they had been in Belsen.”

On July 5, 2013, we are on our way from the hotel in nearly Celle to this destination. Our first concentration camp of the tour.

Trying to remember the name of the concentration camp, the elderly gentleman exclaimed these words as he animated his story from the rocking chair across from me. I was in his daughter’s house on a brilliant July day, twelve summers before. It seems like a lifetime ago. But if I had not taken the time to go there and sit down with him, you would not be reading any of this.

People, mostly news media, get the story wrong all the time. I had not invited the veteran to class because I had had his grandson. It was a series of coincidences that changed so many lives, but then again, I am sure there are no coincidences.

Is it a coincidence that I am making my first trip to Belsen on the day that he is being laid to rest in his hometown back in New York state? Or that by 8pm I will be traveling on the same spur of tracks toward Magdeburg, on which the Sherman light tank he was commanding sixty-eight springs ago came to the train with 2500 Jewish victims of the Holocaust onboard?

I was picking my young children up from daycare. I knew Tim, the other father there at the same time, picking up his young son. I had his older son in class at the time. Tim knew I liked to talk to World War II veterans, and he invited me to come over and speak to his father in law, a retired NYS Supreme Court justice, who was coming up to stay for the summer. So I took him up on it. What a great man, funny too. We conversed on tape for nearly two hours, and I was about to turn the camera off, and his daughter, Tim’s wife Elizabeth, spoke up:

Daughter: Did you mention the train at all? That was kind of interesting.
CW: No, I didn’t tell him about the train.
MR: What was that?
CW: Well, late in the war, again a nice, beautiful April day… we were shooting like crazy across the top of Germany and Major Benjamin of the 743rd was kind of out ahead scouting a little bit… he came back to the battalion and he pulled my tank and George Gross’s tank [fellow tank commander] out. He told us to go with him. So we did.
We came to a place where there was a long train of boxcars. … I can remember pulling up alongside the train of boxcars, Gross and I, and Major Benjamin. As it turned out, it was a train full of concentration camp victims, prisoners, who were being transported from one of their camps…Belsen! I think they had been in Belsen, on their way to another camp…
So there they were. All of these people, men, women, children, jam-packed in those boxcars, I couldn’t believe my eyes. And there they were! So, now they knew they were free, they were liberated. That was a nice, nice thing. I was there for a while that afternoon. You know, you got to feed these people. Give them water. They are in bad shape. Major Benjamin took some pictures, and George Gross took some pictures too…

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

Twelve years later and here I am. I know some of the historians who work here-they have been to America to meet me- and I am going to see an exhibit that in fact incorporates some of the fruits of my labors. To date, we have reunited over 240 persons who were on that transport with the soldiers who liberated them. And I found the photographs that tell the story so well, photos that through the generosity of the soldiers who shared them with me, are now also in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, our national institution.

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, arrived from Auschwitz, to be “housed” near the exchange camp, including Anne Frank and her sister Margot. 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. Anne and Margot were dead, as the first Yanks crossed the Rhine River at the end of March. Hundreds died on the day of liberation. A true scene of horror.

Shortly before the liberation, between April 6 and 9, 1945, 6700 men, women, and children from the exchange camp passed through the camp gates and marched several kilometers to the railhead that many had arrived at months or years earlier. Three train transports of cattle cars and shabby passenger cars were prepared and loaded. Some people were executed for attempting to steal sugar beets at the railhead .
The transports would be headed for the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which at the time was far enough from advancing Allied lines and indeed would prove to be the last camp liberated on the last day of the war (I will trace that route later in our journey). Only one train made it there. The other two were liberated, one by the Americans at Farsleben near Magdeburg, and the other by the Russians near Tröbitz.
The first train left Bergen-Belsen on 6 April 1945 and travelled for six days before coming to a stop near the village of Farsleben. It was this transport that the soldiers I interviewed came upon on Friday, April 13, 1945.

I promised no weighty tomes, but maybe it is too late. 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. 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 today, to some visitors, there is nothing here, just inviting walkways with interpretive signage and some markers. Woods, and open fields.

Matthew Rozell and the ruins at Belsen, 7-5-2013. Jerrilyn Miller photo.

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.

Back out to the camp. The solemn monuments marking the mass graves. 1000 Tote. One thousand dead. 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.

Now 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 I am sure that cosmically, 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.

This was not planned, either. 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.

We tripped the wires of the cosmos. Today was 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.

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The wonder of it all.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Dom Fallacaro, Matthew Rozell, teaching history matters, The wonder of it all., World War II, World War II Living History Project on June 30, 2014| 1 Comment »

June 25, 2014

Readers of this blog know that I spend a lot of time wondering. As I spend more time and gain more experience with the topic at hand, I offer up my two cents. But sometimes conclusions are seemingly far afield until they just hit like a lightning bolt. So it was today. The wonder of it all.

I think it is pretty clear that I have one foot planted in another dimension, and right now I’m straddling a time warp. And it is so interesting to be able to look down and note what is unfolding in time, and maybe how things are related. The “other” dimension changes from time to time, but right now it is firmly rooted in the happenings of seventy or so years ago.

I’m writing a story about a band of Marines, local guys, who went off to war together to fight the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. Out of the sixteen or so I am aware of, I’ve met and interviewed at least half. And all but three now have passed. So I recently got an email from a daughter looking for me to talk to her dad. He had read some of my stuff, saw that I had talked to his buddies, and was ready now to say something, for the record.

Glens Falls Post Star. Dom Fallacaro, bottom row, third from left.

It probably hit me midmorning, looking at the newspaper clippings from 1942-3. Seeing the scrapbook pictures of Marines who were going off to fight the war together. Young guys just out of boot, all spiffed out in their new uniforms. Greenhorns with no real idea of what they had gotten into. Some did not return.

I sat across a table from a 91 year old who was telling me the story of World War II from the perspective of a kid growing up in the Great Depression.
So he began to speak, with his wife of six plus decades by his side. Dom was starting stories, and I was finishing them. Not in a rude way. But in a sense, it was like I had been there too. And I think it made his day, in a way. All of Dom’s buddies have died, or the few who remain are dying. It’s a tough time in a veteran’s life.

But here is a “young” guy who knows, before it comes out of Dom’s mouth, that the fellow Marine he meets for the first time aboard a huge LST ship (bound for the battle of Iwo Jima), discovering that Dom is from Hudson Falls, NY (like him) is now taking Dom back to the huge winch on the ship, and proudly showing it off because it was made in their hometown, at the Sandy Hill Iron and Brass Works! (I had heard this same story from another Marine from our hometown, bound for another battle. His father had made that winch.)

Dom’s cousin Dom. KIA June 1944.

Or when Dom began to tell me about his cousin, who shared the same name as he, from Buffalo, NY, who was killed in 1944 in Europe. His wife Grace pulled a tattered newspaper clipping out of the scrapbook, one that Dom carried in his wallet for years. Dom told me that he was lying down and one of his tentmates from Buffalo was reading the newspaper from home, and tossed it over to him, telling him that “he” had died. Shocked, he clipped his cousin’s death notice and carried it in his wallet for the rest of the war. When Dom started to tell me the story, I knew that a WW II era New Yorker with the same name from Buffalo had died, as I had done some on-line research on Dom before coming to the interview. So I told Dom his cousin had been in the Army Air Corps. He nodded and then we connected the cosmic dots.
About nine months later, Dom suffered an extreme appendicitis attack as the fight for Iwo Jima wound down, and wound up being operated on as they sailed away, nearly dying. The ship he was on had even altered its course to save the young Marine (the doctors demanded the ship stop shifting and zigging and zagging so much during the critical operation. As Dom said, his buddies did not realize he was so important!) He was on Guam returning to his truck driving duties and preparing for what would have been the Nov. 1945 invasion of Japan-his outfit was scheduled to be in the first wave-when the atomic bombs ended the war. So you can guess how he felt about that.

I sat with him and his wife Grace for two hours. Turns out the grandmother I never knew-she died before I was born-would clean and mend the curtains of the family and for the mom and pop store that Dom and Grace ran for forty years, seven days a week, fourteen hours a day.
After the camera was put away, four generations from our little town had lunch at the table at their camp on Glen Lake. For a kid who dropped out at age sixteen-“are you going to be a professional student, or are you going to work?” was the question of the day, in the Depression era-Dom looked around and fairly beamed at what it all meant to him.

He saw things that he put away for many years. Grace knew, from the naps he would stir restlessly in. He might not have shared everything with his family, but his family kept him going and together, they prospered. Now, here, as the old war buddies who survived pass on, maybe it is time for reflection. Dom is a survivor too, and he knows it. What blessings he shared with me today. And I think that is what he really wanted to say to me today, why he wanted to talk. How blessed he is, for his family, for their love, and for the love of his buddies.

After 91 years on this earth, the wonder of it all.

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The Sixth of June.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 30th Infantry Division, 743rd Tank Battalion, Bill Gast, D-Day, history education, teaching history matters, World War II, World War II Living History Project on June 6, 2014|

So, it is the sixth of June again.

The ocean pounds the advance of sand amidst the relics of a different age, the hulking remnants of the tide of battle. The surf rolls in and kisses the beach, as the last participants mix on the hallowed bluff above with the politicians who have gathered from all over the world.

Thirty years ago I watched as the American president honored the fallen, and the living, at the cemetery for the fortieth anniversary. Just out of college, something stirred inside me. Something was awoken.

Thirty years have passed. I began by writing letters to the newspaper. I began to interview D-Day veterans and others. I began to collect stories- not relics, prizes, or artifacts. I really had little interest in captured Nazi flags or samurai swords.

I wanted to talk to the men who were there.

The fiftieth anniversary came next with great pomp and more reflection. It graced the covers of the major newsweeklies. “Saving Private Ryan” stirred the consciousness of a new generation, and reflections of the old. And I learned so much more of the war beyond the beachhead. That there were so many beachheads.

The sixtieth anniversary came around. Students on their bi-annual trips to France would bring me back their photographs and the requisite grains of white sand from Omaha Beach. Teenagers had their emotions a bit tempered, I think. I would go on to introduce them to so many who were there. When they themselves were teenagers.

So now it is the seventieth. On the 65th, I wrote about a friend who is no longer here for the 70th. Another president spoke today, and the 75th will bring fewer who were there back to Normandy.

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Today I would like to introduce you to a survivor of D Day who is still with us.

I first met Bill Gast at a reunion of 30th Infantry Division and 743rd Tank Battalion soldiers at a reunion in March 2008, in which I was present with several Holocaust survivors who were meeting their liberating soldiers for the first time. Later, Bill came to my high school to speak to students. I think the experience of sharing, and meeting the Holocaust survivors whom the 743rd came upon and liberated, affected him deeply.

Unlike many who may be physically able, Bill has no intention of going back to the sands of Omaha for this anniversary. As he explained to our students in 2009,

“I’m listed [in the event program] as a liberator- however, I am also a survivor of World War II, having landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France on D-day and fighting through to the end when the Germans surrendered, May the 7^th, 1945.”

“Pictures.

Video games.

Movies.

Words.

They simply do not covey the feeling of fear.

The shock.

The stench.

The noise.

The horror, and the tragedy.

The injured.

The suffering.

The dying, and the dead.”

A couple weeks ago this article popped up. So glad to see Bill’s name.

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D-Day: the view from a tank on Omaha Beach

By Mathieu Rabechault May 23, 2014 6:46 AM

Washington (AFP) – From inside his tank, the young soldier could see “practically nothing” on Omaha Beach.

Seventy years later, William Gast still wonders whether he rolled over his comrades sheltering from German gunfire that day.

Gast was 19 years old the morning of June 6, 1944. “We came in at H-10, that was 10 minutes before the designated hour.”

He cannot recall why he and his fellow soldiers arrived early, but he has other memories that have never left him.

As part of Company A, 743rd Tank Battalion, 1st Army, Gast remembers the training beforehand in Britain, when he rehearsed driving the Sherman tank onto the landing craft. And then floating in the English Channel.

“Another night we went out and we didn’t come back. That was it.”

Gast got to know the captain of the landing craft that would ferry his tank to the beaches of Normandy.

The skipper promised he would get them close enough that they would not be submerged in water, like so many tanks were that day.

He kept his word.

Another tank unit at Omaha Beach was less fortunate, with 27 of 32 tanks launched at sea five kilometers (three miles) from the coast sinking before they could reach land, despite being outfitted with a flotation screens.

“The order was given to go, we started our engines up, they lowered the ramp,” said Gast.

Amid German shrapnel and sea spray, he “could feel the tracks spinning.”

At last, the tank tracks took hold on the sandy sea bottom and he drove up the beach.

– Like throwing marbles at a car –

Down below in the driver’s seat, Gast tried to steer the tank with the aid of a small, manual periscope.

“You can imagine how much we could see, practically nothing,” he said.

The radios inside the tank were so unreliable that his commander would tell Gast which way to turn by kicking him on the left or right shoulder.

The difficulty in seeing the way ahead has left Gast with a gnawing sense that he may have run over the bodies of American soldiers on the beach.

“The saddest part about the whole thing is, not being able to see, I may have run over some of my own people.

“And if I did, I don’t even know it. I can’t ever get that out of my mind, you know?”

Bill Gast awarded the Silver Star.

Corporal Gast heard machine gun bullets hitting the side of the tank, “like throwing marbles at a car — that’s what it sounded like.”

“And there were shells that exploded right beside me. You could feel the tank shake.”

For Gast, it was a day of fear and terror, and following orders without reflection.

“I can’t tell much about what happened, I was scared to death to start with,” he said.

“It was just like putting it on automatic, you just did what you had to do, did what you were told to do.”

By noon, close to 19,000 American soldiers who landed at Omaha were still pinned down on the beach.

– High school sweetheart –

Carefully laid plans had unraveled as the beach became a killing zone, with troops mowed down under a fusillade of German machine gun, artillery and mortar fire.

Small teams of US troops eventually managed to break through on the bluffs between German positions, with the help of combat engineers blowing up obstacles.

The losses were staggering: more than 2,000 dead, wounded and missing on Omaha beach. The exact toll is still unknown. Of the 15 tanks in Gast’s Company A, only five survived without damage.

Gast, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, earned the Silver Star and the Purple Heart during his combat tour, and went on to marry his high school sweetheart.

Now 89 years old, he recently was awarded France’s Legion d’Honneur at a small ceremony for World War II veterans at the French embassy in Washington.

Bill Gast, Silver Star citation.

The short, soft spoken man stood up to receive the medal and shook hands with a French diplomat. But he has no plans to return to Normandy for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

His son, Bill, said his father did not want to relive that day: “It’s important we don’t forget but you try to hide things somewhere.”

http://news.yahoo.com/d-day-view-tank-omaha-beach-104656852.html

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NBC News asked them if, history really mattered.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 42nd Infantry Division, 45th Infantry Division, Boxcars of Dead at Dachau, Dachau, history education, Holocaust, Holocaust Education, liberation of Dachau, Liberators, narrative history, teaching history matters, World War II, World War II Living History Project on April 29, 2014| 1 Comment »

April 30 1945 Headlines. Hangs in my classroom.

Today, April 29th, is the anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, 69 years on. Today, if it 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 sub article:

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

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

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For me, it’s not about hero worship, or glorifying the liberator or any World War II soldier as some kind of savior. Many of the liberating soldiers I know 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”.

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.

Class of 2014 in my classroom. Watching archival footage of the liberation.

So yesterday, a film crew arrived from NBCLearn, a division of NBC News, all the way up from New York City. No, I did not call them. They found me. They were doing a related story, so I talked them into coming up (shout out here to the producer, Norm).

They decided they wanted to learn something from our kids- ultimately, I think, whether or not history really mattered anymore.

We have had many lessons on the Holocaust, on the victims especially, but also on the perpetrators and the bystanders. Lessons on the liberation, and what we have been studying all along.

These kids have witnessed soldiers’ and survivors’ testimony. They have interviewed their own subjects, firsthand, and established relationships with this generation. And therefore, they become the new witnesses to the deeds of this generation. And with this, they will carry a new responsiblity. To never forget, and to not let others forget, the lessons of the past.

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The raw film is rolling in the classroom. I guess it’s time for me to see what has happened to change the kids. What have they learned, and how have they grown? But today it is time to set the written exam to the side.

We watch the testimony of the liberator who had visited our school in the past, and viewed the archival footage and photographs from 69 years ago.

And then editor poses the questions for the kids. “Why is it important to study the Holocaust? “What difference do you think it makes to know about this, our past? What do you think motivated our soldiers to go off and fight? Was it just “patriotism?”

What did your class learn? What have YOU learned?”

The completed video will be shown in schools across the country. Below are some of the kids of Hudson Falls, who make their small town proud.

Meg V.

Koreena H

Klayton S.

Class of 2014 in my classroom, April 28, 2014. NBC News has arrived.

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Ripples.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 30th Infantry Division, 743rd Tank Battalion, belsen concentration camp, bergen belsen concentration camp, Bergen Belsen Memorial, concentration camps, Diane Sawyer, Farsleben, for the sake of humanity, Hillersleben, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Holocaust Education, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Holocaust survivor-liberator reunion, humanity, Matthew Rozell, narrative history, Power of Teaching, Stephen B Barry Memorial Fellowship, Steve Barry, teaching history matters, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, World News Tonight, World War II, World War II Living History Project on April 28, 2014|

Matthew Rozell, Stephen Barry, National DOR Ceremony, Washington, DC April 2010. This photo was taken the day after the 65th anniversary of Steve’s liberation in April 1945. We had just been honored by the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum before the national ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda.

So, the ripples continue. Somebody said it was like pebbles being tossed into the still water. This may sound strange, but I am keenly aware of the cosmic element. We tripped the wires of the cosmos.

~”It’s not for my sake, it’s for the sake of humanity, that they will remember”~

I got a nice email recently. My friend Steve Barry was honored Tuesday evening at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Steve’s daughters wanted me to know that his family made a donation in his name and set up two fellowships for scholars at the USHMM in the Stephen B. Barry Memorial Fellowship. His girls mentioned me in their speech Tuesday night in Washington. Thanks ladies. You know he was a hero. He reached out and touched an awful lot of students in the short time that we were together.

Steve will be one of the persons who will be featured in my book. Against all the odds he survived the Holocaust and later even went on to become a US Army Ranger in the Korean War! I was pretty close to him. Right now I am wistfully looking at his homemade holiday greeting cards under my desk glass, and to my left, a foot away, are the shelves containing his Holocaust library, which was passed on to me after he passed away. He was so funny, too. He told me he nearly “choked on my bagel” a few years back when he opened his newspaper in Florida and read about me and the train he had been looking for, for so many years!

I miss the guy. You can read more about him here.

Steve’s name on the wall of donors, USHMM, unveiled April 29, 2014.

The inscription kind of says it all. He uttered these words in my very classroom on a Thursday morning to a film crew from New York City, aimed at the 1500 students that he and the other survivors and American soldier/liberators had come to address. That Friday evening of our big soldier/survivor reunion, we watched it together on national news before our final banquet.

You can see the video at the bottom-he’s the one in the preview addressing the interviewer- but the transcript is below.

ABC WORLD NEWS TONIGHT, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2009

Diane Sawyer: And finally tonight, our Persons of the Week. It is a story that began almost 65 years ago in the darkest days of World War II. Yet this week, a new chapter unfolded. An unforgettable reunion of Holocaust survivors, and the American troops who freed them, and all made possible by a high school history class.

Matthew Rozell: This is history coming alive.
Veteran 1, entering school with his wife: Here we are, we have arrived!
Matthew Rozell: This is walking, talking, living history. They’re (the students) shaking hands with the past…

Diane Sawyer: It was 2001 when high school history teacher Matt Rozell decided to begin an oral history project. He and his students would just interview family members in the small town of Hudson Falls, New York, to capture fading stories of World War II.
Interviewer (soldier’s daughter): Did you mention the train [to Mr. Rozell] at all before?
Carrol Walsh, former soldier: No I didn’t tell him about the train.

Diane Sawyer: The students unearthed a forgotten crossroads in history. (Gunfire, archival film footage) Near the very end of World War II, April 13th, 1945, the American 30th Infantry Division was pushing its way into central Germany.
Carrol Walsh: We came to a place where there was a long train, of boxcars.

Diane Sawyer: They found a train, holding nearly 2,500 emaciated Jewish prisoners, many just children, being moved from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, to another camp and certain death. Their German guards had just abandoned them, fleeing the Americans.

Carrol Walsh: A feeling of helplessness. What are we going to do with all these people?
Frank Towers, former soldier: We had never ever seen anything so, (pauses) filthy.

Diane Sawyer: The American soldiers fed the prisoners, and brought them to safety.

Stephen Barry: For 42 years I collected anything that I could to try to find any article regarding the train. It just didn’t exist!

Diane Sawyer: But Mr. Rozell’s class put their interviews with veterans up on a website, along with these photographs taken by the American soldiers.

George Gross: Just very courageous people, little girls who with big smiles on their faces, one of them with their arms out, just aware that the Americans are there. [camera pans over 1945 liberation photograph]

Diane Sawyer: Out there on the web, Holocaust survivors all around the world began to notice.

Stephen Barry: I mean, how many people have a picture of their moment of liberation forever? [camera pans over 1945 liberation photograph]

(students and veterans and survivors singing “The Star Spangled Banner”)

Diane Sawyer: A reunion of the survivors and their liberators took place this week at Hudson Falls High School.

Emily Murphy, student: When they speak to us, you can’t say that you feel how they felt. But you get the feeling, you feel like you were there.

Diane Sawyer: In an age where there are still those who deny the Holocaust ever existed, these survivors say they are the living proof.

Stephen Barry: It’s not for my sake, it’s for the sake of humanity, that they will remember.

Diane Sawyer: And so we choose history teacher Matt Rozell, his class, the Holocaust survivors of that train, and the American soldiers who kept them and their story alive. And that is World News for this Friday. I am Diane Sawyer, and from all of us at ABC News, we hope you have a great weekend.