A Train Near Magdeburg

by Matthew Rozell

  Thanking you in anticipation.

  Sincerely,

  Alexandra (Lexie) Keston

  I sat there. I could not move. Had I just been contacted by a person who lived through that nightmare, and found the photos of her liberation day? Do I bear some responsibility for this?

  In March 2002, exactly four years earlier, I had uploaded George Gross’s narrative of the liberation, along with the photographs that he and Major Benjamin had taken that day, onto my website, with his most appreciative blessing for my endeavor. At that time the website had about 20 World War II veteran interviews posted that the kids and I had done over the years; on a good day, the website might have brought in 25 or 30 visitors. But unbeknownst to me, the staff at the Bergen–Belsen Memorial had taken note of it, and was now directing survivors and their descendants to what was turning out to be our unique archive of Holocaust liberation photos and interviews, offered up by the liberators themselves.

  Stunned, I read Lexie’s words, over and over. The kids were still taking the test as I stared at the screen with my eyes welling up. I wiped my eyes, looking up to see if any of them were watching me. No, not this time, but there will be many more such moments in my future. Over 10,000 miles away from me, reaching out across space and time, a six-year-old girl who was now a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother signaled to me that on some level, past and present just became one.

  *

  And so it began. In my first interview with Judge Walsh in July 2001, he had mentioned that a doctor in London had recently placed a notice in the 30th Infantry Division newsletter about this train, wanting to contact any of his liberators, if they were still alive. Walsh read the notice and responded, and only two months before my initial interview with Walsh, Dr. Peter Lantos became the first of the survivors of that train to contact his liberator George Gross. I was in contact with Dr. Gross by that time, and he told me about it, and also that Dr. Lantos was working on his memoir. And shortly after I heard from Lexie, he described his experiences.

  From: Dr. George C. Gross

  Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2006 7:02 PM

  To: Rozell Matt

  Subject: Re: The Train story...

  Dear Matt,

  It was good to hear from you and to learn of your plans to write a book. You certainly have my permission to use any pictures and text of mine that you have, both for the interview and for the book. I think the stories of Peter Lantos and Lexie are important for the world to hear. Both show the indomitable resilience of the human psyche, for both have led productive—and evidently happy—lives despite the terrors and tragedies of their childhood. Peter has spent a career of service to mankind as an expert in clinical neuroscience and undoubtedly saved many lives and pushed back the limits of our understanding of the brain and how it works. Think how close we came to losing that great mind to the stupidity of the Holocaust, and think how many talents like his were lost to the world in that madness! Lexie, with her charming family of daughters and granddaughters, shows another face of the triumph of the human will in building a rich family life despite the traumatic events of her childhood.

  Their stories both carry stern warnings against antisemitism, racism, intolerance of other religions, fascism, and foolish prejudices of all kinds but also carry the hopeful message of the strength of humanity. I am happy that you, with all the demands you have upon your time as a teacher, have been willing to spend so much time with your students building and maintaining the web site and are planning to devote more time in writing a book. I thank you for that dedication.

  I don't know if Lexie told you of our first telephone conversation. I was sitting in my LazyBoy[*], swearing at the newspaper, when the telephone interrupted my colorful monologue. ‘Hello!’ I barked into the intruding instrument, forgetting that the innocent person on the other end of the line had had no part in the irritating news events. ‘Hello,’ a tremulous and tentative voice replied. ‘Is this George C. Gross?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered, in a gentler tone because I realized that the person calling was in a wrought-up state. Almost crying, the voice continued, ‘Did you have anything to do with a death train near Magdeburg in April 1945?’ When I said yes, with great interest at last, she started to cry, and then pulled herself together to tell me her story. After years of searching for information about the train, she had discovered your site, read the story there, found my name and home city, and immediately decided to call. She told me she was ready to keep calling every Gross in Spring Valley until she found me. Luckily for her pocketbook, I was the first call she tried; the cost of one phone call from Australia must have put quite a dent in her budget. At any rate, we had a good, emotionally charged conversation, exchanged E-mail addresses, and have corresponded regularly since then. I put her in touch with Peter, and the two have corresponded.

  I am still amazed to have gotten, out of the blue, a call from so far away about an event that occurred so long ago. That call was a direct result of the work you and your students have put into your site, and I thank you for it. The event remains lively in my memory, but such contact with people who were on the train makes the event even more vivid as I contemplate the day and its ramifications.[*]

  Gratefully yours,

  George

  *

  The following November, another ripple arrived in my inbox.

  From: Micha Tomkiewicz

  Sent: Wednesday, November 01, 2006 10:44 AM

  To: Rozell Matt

  Subject: A Train Near Magdeburg

  Dear Mr. Rozell. I am also a ‘child survivor’ that was riding on this train from Bergen–Belsen to an unknown destination. Yesterday I got the link through a historian in the camp. My wife claims that she can identify me through one of the photographs, but since there is probably nobody alive that can confirm or refute this claim, I will let it stand. The larger issue for me is that we have suddenly the opportunity to thank these guys. Since through your initiative you sort of deserve to become an honorary president of the ‘graduates’ of the ‘Train Near Magdeburg’—it might be a good idea to try to organize a meeting of the survivors and the soldiers to give us a collective opportunity to say thank you.

  Thanks again,

  Micha (Marcin) Tomkiewicz

  Prof. Micha Tomkiewicz, Director

  Environmental Studies Program

  Department of Physics

  Brooklyn College of CUNY

  Brooklyn, NY

  Dr. Tomkiewicz, or Micha as I would come to know him, called me about a month later and we had a good conversation. Micha was a young boy about the same age as Peter Lantos imprisoned in Bergen–Belsen, and like Peter, was later liberated with only his mother, his father having been killed trying to escape from one of the last deportation trains to Treblinka out of the Warsaw Ghetto. He helped to plant the seed of my efforts to have a reunion of sorts with the liberators and survivors, and the next catalyst was going to find me the following April.

  From: Fred Spiegel

  Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2007 3:29 PM

  To: Rozell Matt

  Subject: Magdeburg 1945

  Dear Matthew Rozell:

  I will be 75 years old on April 21. I was liberated by American troops on April 13, 1945, near Farsleben and Magdeburg. It was one week before my 13th birthday. I actually visit many schools here in Central and Southern New Jersey, to speak about my experiences during the Holocaust. I came across your web site through a teacher who is doing a project about my experiences and she found your website about George Gross and Carrol Walsh.

  I have actually written a book, about my experiences, which was published in September 2004. Students in schools like to buy it, so it is selling well. It is easy to read, because I wanted young people to read it.

  Anyway it was very interesting to read the website. It is quite amazing what those soldiers remember.

  Very best regards,

  Fred Spiegel

  This seemed to me to be almost beyond belief. With Fred, I had four survivors of whom
I was now aware, and the seed which had been planted in my brain began to germinate. Judge Walsh, now retired, spent much of the year in Florida, but in the summer he would come to Hudson Falls as he had done that summer six years before when I sat down to interview him the first time. Why not organize an event to bring them all together? And since he would not be leaving until late September, why not do it so that students might witness and hear the testimony, and learn?

  I immediately wrote to all of them, and over the summer of 2007, things began to fall into place. We set a date—Friday, September 14, 2007, at our high school in Hudson Falls. Micha and Fred lived only about a four-hour drive away, and Peter would be available to fly to New York City to drive up with Micha and his wife Louise. Fred and his wife Yael also would be driving up. They would all be driving right past the family homestead at 2 Main Street, Hudson Falls, straight up the road to our small-town American high school—a German survivor rounded up in Holland, a Hungarian survivor, and a Polish survivor, a microcosm of those persecuted during the Holocaust throughout Europe who shared at least one thing in common, besides their Jewish identity—they had the same liberators, and they had me. And now they were coming face-to-face with one of the men who saved them.

  *

  I started investigating the possibility of a reunion even before school let out in June of 2007. My school was very supportive, and agreed that it would be a great learning opportunity for the children, and went so far as to set aside a day in September so that all of the students at the high school could be in attendance. My fellow teachers were excited and planned many steps.

  I also believed that this event would be of interest to a wider audience. I contacted several media outlets and a friend at the Associated Press, Chris Carola, who worked out of the Albany, New York, bureau and had come up to the region many times before to cover another project I was heavily involved with, the archeological digs in our region at military sites from the colonial wars and the American Revolution. Chris was very interested, interviewed Judge Walsh and some of the survivors, and sent a photographer up the day before the survivors arrived to be present as I had Judge Walsh in my classroom telling his story to my tenth graders. The camera shutter clicked as he and I and the students interacted. Chris wrote his story, then posted it on the Associated Press’s New York State wires, and told me we could be getting calls from New York City-area television and radio stations. He also told me he sent it to the Washington, D.C., national operations, and he thought it was possible that it would be picked up internationally for newspapers overseas. He closed with the caution, ‘I just want to prepare you for a possible media onslaught on Hudson Falls High School.’

  *

  On a crisp September morning in 2007, cars began arriving in the parking lot of a local restaurant where a small welcoming breakfast was planned for our guests. Judge Walsh’s family was there, as were school administrators and several of the students and teachers who were involved in the project. Carrol finished up with an interview with a crew from the CBS Evening News, then greeted the three survivors who had come to meet him.

  Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh

  It was quite emotional. They had an early morning breakfast, and that was the first that I met three of the survivors. And you know what I said to them? ‘Long time, no see!’ [Laughs]

  The three that I met were very young on the train. A couple of them were, I think, teenagers, but for the most part they were children.

  So here we were at long last, survivors and the old soldier seated round a breakfast table, families, friends, students, and teachers witnessing the first miracle of our gatherings.

  Following breakfast, we headed to the high school for the day’s testimony in front of the student body and staff. Students were excited, and some of the kids had worked on a short film introducing the liberators and what they encountered, juxtaposed with the photographs of the day of the liberation. Lexie Keston, the first survivor to contact me from Australia, had her greetings read to the assembled school.

  Lexie Friedman Keston

  I will never forget the day when I opened the website of the Hudson Falls High School World War II Living History Project, and before my unbelieving eyes I was looking back to 1945—more accurately to April 13, 1945—the day of my liberation by the Ninth US Army.

  The eleven photographs before me were taken when I was six years old, younger than either of my two little granddaughters. The train had stopped at the siding of the small station at Farsleben, some 16 kilometers from Magdeburg. I had been on this train with my parents and some 2,500 people all from the Camp Bergen–Belsen. I had been incarcerated there from July 15, 1943 until April 7, 1945. In the camp we had the unusual classification of ‘For Exchange to Palestine’; most were classified as ‘Jew.’ I think that this is the only reason that we were kept together and survived as a family for nearly two years in the most horrific of circumstances.

  So now, some 61 years later in January 2006, in front of my computer at my home, I was confronted with photographs of the day of my liberation. I found this experience so raw and emotional that I screamed, and then burst into tears.

  I studied the photographs looking and searching for myself. I thought that I could be one of the little girls, sitting in the group photo in January 2006, but I dismissed this for I assumed my mother would be somewhere nearby, and I did not see her.

  I looked at the bleak, miserable geography of the site, the horrible train carriages, the skeletal human shapes—fortunately my memory is still a blank. I do not remember being in the train for 6 days; I do not remember being hungry or thirsty. All I remember is being out of the train, standing on the ground, and watching the German guards fleeing and dropping their guns. I picked up one of these guns, and before I could do anything, it was snatched from my hands. That is my only memory of that day.

  ‘A Historical Miracle’

  The events of the day are documented visually and that is incredible to believe. For no written words could describe so vividly the happenings of that day as do these eleven photographs. It is a historical miracle that Major Benjamin and tank commander George Gross had their small Kodak camera—and that on that day, there was film left to use and record the day.

  With today’s incredible technology anyone on our planet can see this photographic evidence of my liberation. It is the foresight of that other man of goodwill—your history teacher Matt Rozell—that these photographs were posted for all to access.

  Following a series of events, I have developed a warm email relationship with Professor George Gross, with Judge Carrol Walsh, and Carrol’s daughter Elizabeth. It is a great joy for me to hear about their lives today and of their family happenings. The fact that this connection was made some 61 years after the event is very difficult to believe possible.

  But it is so.

  The friendship I have developed with these two wonderful men has helped me to bring some sort of closure to that unfortunate time in my childhood. The interest they, as well as Matt, have shown in wanting to know my story has given me the encouragement I needed to write about some of my experiences. I did do so, and my story will be published in an anthology of some twenty stories of the members of my child survivors group here.

  Thank you, Matt Rozell, for teaching your students about tolerance and the evils of prejudice. I applaud and compliment you on your good work. You have touched the lives of your students and a growing number of survivors. You have also, I think, affected the lives of the two liberators, George and Carrol.

  Your history course on this Train at Magdeburg is teaching your students the evil that was perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust, against innocent people, whose only sin was that they were Jews.

  I hope one of the messages that your course has instilled into the psyche of your students is that ‘Evil Happens When Good Men Do Nothing.’

  Peter Lantos, who had just completed his memoir, Parallel Lines, spoke.

  Peter Lantos

  To get
you accustomed to my accent, which hovers between British and Hungarian, I tell people of my American dream, which is not the traditional, classical American dream but a dream of a teenager, of myself, living in [postwar] Hungary, which at the time was a communist country, closed to the world. We had a relative in the United States, and Uncle Marcel left Hungary in the 1920s for a successful engineering career. And some of the things I really seem to remember were beautiful guide books of New York [City]. Living in a small Hungarian town in which the tallest building had only two stories, I could not believe that this building, buildings like this existed. So the dream was to see New York, and the States [someday]. And indeed I did see New York in the early 1970s. I visited many times for medical conferences, or visiting friends and relatives; I still have two cousins living here. However, as I was walking in Manhattan yesterday, it suddenly occurred to me that without Judge Walsh and Dr. Gross, [with emotion] I would have been dead.

  Dr. Lantos described his book, and his life after surviving the Holocaust, and his initial contact with the liberators. He closed with the following.

  And what I have wanted to do here [in the book] was not just [express] a morbid interest in the past. There is not self-pity; I just simply wanted to know what happened. Why it happened, that I don’t know. So the end remains, and the only thing I have left to express is my gratitude to George and Carrol.

  Judge Walsh was later interviewed and asked what this first meeting meant to him.

  Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh

  Q. It may be a silly question to ask, but in the years after the war, did you ever think of that day when you came upon that train?