*
The ‘6 million’ number is a HUGE exaggeration. Jews use the holocaust [sic] to garner sympathy and provide cover for their war crimes against the Palestinians. We studied this in college.
*
It comes with the territory, I suppose, that if you are passionate about teaching the Holocaust and attract high-profile attention, the trolls will begin their attempts to worm their way into the narrative. It began immediately after the very first reunion in 2007. I had received hundreds of emails from all over the world in support of my project, but I also got my first taste of this aberrant phenomenon known as Holocaust denial. Three emails, out of over three hundred, spewed forth their hate, with one containing in the subject line:
‘SIX MILLION LIVES=SIX MILLION LIES’
My knee-jerk reaction was to delete them. But in the years that followed, as my blog built a following, more detailed attacks began; I began to archive them to create lessons for my students on Holocaust denial. One man, or woman—a hallmark of online Holocaust deniers is to hide behind false identities—even built a fictitious ‘news’ website attacking the first reunion, at a URL beginning with ‘blockyourid.com’:
‘Tank Commander Saves Fellow Jews From Gas Chambers’
Who Actually Believes This Garbage?
Izzie Gross, a tank commander, whose Sherman tank faced down a 'Death Train,' shows up at a local high school with three survivors. Oddly the dates are off, the camps were liberated four months earlier, but who are we to doubt?
Maybe the Nazis were going to break through the Russia[sic] lines, crash in Auschwitz, and gas these poor survivors?
The denier posted false photographs of the liberators and me, claiming that we were all Jewish co-conspirators, when the opposite was true. My students were horrified, though they got a kick out of the photograph of me, which obviously was not me. The website was so bad that it did have a comical element; even commenters in a notorious white supremacist chatroom wondered if the author ‘JudicialInc’ was losing his touch.
There were others who followed, like someone with the handle ‘LittleGreyRabbit,’ who took me to task for this and that at my blog. My policy is not to debate them directly, as there is no reasoning with these individuals, to be sure—rather, I have attempted to deal with their commentary by encouraging students to critically think and be aware. I no longer delete the lies, and depending on the nature of the ill-reasoned commentary, it is relatively easy to counterpoint the nonsense. A case in point that I wrote at my blog is below.
Hello, I came here after reading Dan Porat’s The Boy, where some of the Hillersleben photos feature [sic].
Hi, yes, I was consulted by the author, and helped him get some of the photos of the liberation, which took place at Farsleben, not Hillersleben.
Maybe I am missing something here, but the people on this train don’t look like walking skeletons to me. German civilian rations were 1600 calories pro Tag 1944/1945, so the fact that the photos you present show individuals that look slim but hardly starved seems to undermine your central thesis – namely History Matters. Clearly, you don’t think so or you would use your material more carefully.
Clearly, it was not I, but soldier eyewitnesses who referred to the prisoners as ‘walking skeletons.’ Also, these ‘slim’ individuals were so weak that many could hardly stand—again, more liberator testimony. Maybe the soldiers are lying, something that has been suggested by skeptics before. Several ‘slim people’ are lying dead on the hillside in the background—and the skeptic has missed the point, that the ones physically able to pose for a photograph have done so. Many more could not even get out of the cars without assistance—many were dead inside the cars, literally falling out on top of horrified soldiers as they slid open the doors—something the skeptic would have learned had he been more thorough in his research of my work. Perhaps he would suggest that the boys in the photo below, taken by US forces the day after liberation, are the picture of health. And thanks for bringing in the plight of the unfortunate German civilians. Perhaps we should compare suffering here as well.
Secondly, don’t you think you are being rather disrepectful [sic] of the sacrifice shown by the American GI by continually reducing their experience down to the liberation of some detainees on a train. It verges on insulting to continually insist that people who repeatedly saw their buddies being blown away would privilege the experience of 2500 Jewish people on a train who don’t look starved at all [sic]
I think it is a little ironic that the skeptic ignores the many posts I have on the sacrifices of soldiers—and not the train liberation at all—a common thread throughout my work, which he must have run across if he used the link in Porat’s book to get to this site.[*] And it is also stated here on my ‘Welcome’ page, that ‘if you are a Holocaust denier/minimizer/revisionist, and/or run-of-the-mill hate-spewer, thank you in advance for sparing me your epistles… I’ve already heard it all.’ Sadly, I’ll also be adding the word ‘skeptic’ to my list. It can really get tiring, but thanks for writing to remind me that I have a better job to do.
*
Holocaust denial began with the perpetrators, their euphemisms, their secret orders, and their penchant for destroying and trying to hide evidence of their crimes. Even with the film footage of the liberators, or Eisenhower’s admonition to future generations, and the importance of the evidence and testimony presented at the postwar trials, Holocaust denial increases as time passes. And let’s not forget state sponsorship of Holocaust denial in certain quarters of the world.
I remember well one student’s incredulous question, after witnessing survivor testimony, directed at the survivor who had just described his experience. The survivor replied, ‘You see, it is easy for people to deny the Holocaust, because no one can truly grasp its magnitude and scope.’ ‘Unbelievable’ is a word used by liberator and survivor alike. And it will take effort to not allow the memory of the original eyewitnesses to vanish in the rearview mirror of history.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Mystery
I watched the Perseid meteor showers last night. I could not sleep; I ventured outdoors on the hill, and looked up into the dark starry sky. The Earth we all share ventured again through the trail of cosmic debris left by the wake of an ancient comet, one that circles the sun every 133 years. Each trail of light I saw was the fantastic finale to a flyby that occurred millennia ago, each flash across the sky a culmination of a journey of a billion miles or more. Like the pieces of the cosmos, special people sometimes enter our lives in unforeseen and unexpected ways; they flash across our paths, and leave their marks seared upon our souls.
I never got to say goodbye to George Gross. It was George Gross who took the liberation photos as a young man and composed the beautiful prose as an old one, which I then placed on our website and which then became the vehicle for leading the survivors to us. I chose the title for this book in a tribute to him, as that is what he titled his recollections. And it was he who cultivated a deep friendship with me via his wonderful email communications and telephone conversations. How amazed and happy he seemed to be to hear from all the survivors.
I was trying to figure out the logistics of a visit to California when I learned of his death on February 1, 2009. He had been ailing for a long time, and he died at home with his family around him. Though I never met him, he came into my life at a dark time dealing with the loss of my own parents; in many ways he was like a father figure and mentor to me. And perhaps not coincidentally, the survivors and I entered his life around the time that he was grieving for his wife, Marlo.
Judge Walsh did not attend that last reunion in 2011 at our high school, either. He had not been feeling well, and just did not feel up to it, though before he headed back to Florida for the winter months he went out to dinner with me and my family, his family, and two survivors and their families who were passing through town.
We had a small room to ourselves, and with many children it was slightly noisy and ver
y busy. I was seated across from Paul Arato, a child survivor from Hungary now living in Toronto who had contacted me, stunned, at the urging of his son a year after the very first reunion. The following spring, he met his liberators in Charleston, South Carolina, and briefly lost his composure telling his story for the first time, a young boy in the Bergen–Belsen camp with his younger brother and mother. As he told our students in the 2009 gathering a year later, ‘I grew up and spent all my years being angry. This means I don’t have to be angry anymore.’ After this reunion, he began developing a close relationship with Judge Walsh.
So here we were again, and I did not say much. I just wanted to watch and listen. Though Carrol was not feeling up to par, he roared with laughter as Paul told of getting on a plane to the United States at the tender age of 15, following his family’s immigration to Canada—Paul felt he was destined to design cars in Detroit, you see—and being picked up by Detroit law enforcement at the airport and driven to the bridge to Canada and bid farewell by the seat of his teenage pants, as he had neglected the proper papers to immigrate. Carrol laughed so hard that his hands crashed down on the table. Later, outside of the restaurant, he stopped and rested his hand on my forearm, and quietly thanked me for bringing these wonderful families into his life. I sensed there was something else there, something that I will never be able to share, or that our families will never be quite able to touch—and that is the special bond between the liberating soldier and Holocaust survivor, the unspoken love and joy at having been reconnected after so many years.
Steve Barry knew this, too. At our 2009 school reunion, Frank Towers and Steve were sitting at a home economics table, doing a joint interview for a Florida TV station. During the course of their conversation in front of the camera, I noticed as Steve’s hand unpretentiously crept over and rested atop Frank’s hand while he was talking. In a 2009 radio interview, Carrol and Steve recounted the very first time that they were able to meet, face-to-face, in November 2007, and the close relationship they developed afterwards.
STEVE BARRY
We called [Carrol and Dorothy Walsh] on the cell phone. We called his home on a cell phone and said, ‘We are almost around the corner from you,’ so when we drove up, the five of us [the Barry family] drove up to the door, and Carrol was already outside.
INTERVIEWER
Was it an emotional moment for you?
STEVE BARRY
Unbelievable; it still is. It just never went away! And I walked over to him and we just embraced each other, right in front of his house. I have all the pictures of that moment and then we went inside and we met his wife, Dorothy. She is a very lovely person. But for some strange coincidence, or maybe it was not, we connected immediately. It is like we became true friends in the matter of a half hour! And stayed that way! I call him on the phone, I exchange emails with him...
CARROL WALSH
I think in my mind it is such an amazing thing that our lives were joined in that moment on April 13, 1945; all the years that have gone by since. We have had lives, families, jobs, whatever. And here we are again, and now we meet face-to-face and recall together that moment when my tank reached the train.
STEVE BARRY
You know, I kept calling him my liberator. He says, ‘I am really not your liberator. It was my job. I just happened to be there!’ I said, ‘I don’t care what you tell me; you are my liberator!’ [Laughs]
INTERVIEWER
I actually have here in my studio, Steve, a copy of a letter he wrote to you, and if you do not mind, I’ll just read a couple of sentences. This is Carrol, writing to you, and he says, ‘You are always expressing gratitude to me, the 743rd Tank Battalion, and the 30th Infantry Division. But I do not believe gratitude is deserved, because we were doing what we, and the whole world, should have been doing—rescuing and protecting innocent people from being killed and murdered by vicious criminals. You do not owe us. We owe you. We can never repay you and the Jewish people of Europe for what was stolen from you—your homes, your possessions, your businesses, your money, your art, your family life, your families, your childhood, your dreams, and all your lives.’
STEVE BARRY
Is this a beautiful person?
You know, when I got the letter, Carrol likes to write longhand. He is not a believer in typing. He likes to write longhand, and when I got the letter, I said, you know, I just cannot possibly keep this letter to myself. I asked him if I have his permission to give this letter to some other people to read it, and he said it was okay.[*]
CARROL WALSH
That is right. I cannot believe today, as I look back on those years and on what was happening; I cannot believe that the world almost ignored those people and what was happening! I cannot believe it! How could we have all stood by and have let that happen? We owe those people a great deal. We owe those people everything. They do not owe us anything. We owe them for what we allowed to happen to them. That is how I feel.[*]
*
My wife and I spent some time with Carrol on a summer afternoon in 2011 at his daughter’s house in Hudson Falls, where it had all started so many years before. He and his wife Dorothy, his daughter Elizabeth, and her children were having lunch with Agnes ‘Agi’ Fleischer Baker and her husband Ron, who were passing through Hudson Falls. Agi also became very close to Carrol and the family, and their little dog delighted Carrol’s great-grandson. After we bid them farewell, I sat with Carrol in his study in the house, discussing books of common interest in his library, listening to his tales of playing championship baseball as a high schooler, and watching him swoon with eyes closed and a smile, snapping his fingers to the swing of Benny Goodman’s clarinet—‘Oh man, that’s some good stuff!’ He got up out of his seat to show me something, and fell short of breath, and gave a flash of frustration and anger that his body was slowing down. After quickly recovering, he and I also went through his 743rd Tank Battalion album at the kitchen table, where he pointed out his old friends and told more stories from a time in his life that he would not take a million dollars to repeat, but also one that he would not take a million dollars to never have experienced—perhaps even more so now.
On December 15, 2012, I called Carrol in Florida where he and Dorothy were now living full time. I did not want to admit it to myself, but my old friend was dying. We both knew it was our last conversation, but he was making jokes to the end. I fumbled a bit, and told him that the weather had been extremely cold up here in the North—ever mindful that since the Battle of the Bulge, freezing in subzero temperatures in his tank, he had hated the cold. With fatigue in his voice, he chuckled and said, ‘I hope that it is cold in the place where I am going!’ He laughed, and his great-grandson made some noise in the background; I think I tried to laugh. Two days later, after bidding Dorothy and the rest of his family goodbye, he slipped away peacefully.
His memorial service was held on July 5, 2013. I could not attend, because as ‘fate’ would have it, I was at Bergen–Belsen on a study tour of authentic Holocaust sites. Paul Arato succumbed to a long illness a week later while I was still in Germany; near the day he passed, I saw his wife Rona’s book about Paul’s Holocaust experiences, and meeting his liberators, in the bookstore at the Sachsenhausen Camp Memorial site. [*]
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In the years following Carrol’s passing, Frank Towers continued to carry on with searching for more of the estimated 425 children who had been on that train. He would Skype frequently with friends in Israel and elsewhere, and work at his computer updating his databases of ‘found’ survivors, clacking away at his research with emails and updates, admonishing folks much younger than himself to ‘get with the times’ and get online. In hotels across the South, he would point to his crowing rooster wristwatch and herd survivors and old soldiers alike, their children and grandchildren, into the conference room as he stepped to the lectern to ‘MC’ the sometimes hours-long testimony sessions. In his words to me, ‘No one in our organization has ever made any attempt in the past to look in
to a project such as yours, so we were not aware of the opportunities to bring about meetings with these survivors. It is time that they were recognized for the suffering that they endured for those years, and for them, like it is for us, time is running out!!’ Here was a man who felt his humanitarian obligation in 1945, and now felt a new urgency in getting out the word—‘At 90, I can only keep chugging along!!’, he wrote when we began in 2007. Frank was outraged that anyone would deny the Holocaust and became a passionate Holocaust educator, speaking to groups large and small. Just after a speech in Florida at a Memorial Day commemoration in 2016, Frank collapsed due to heart problems. The liberator who had presided over no less than eight major soldier-survivor reunions and a host of smaller one-day luncheon gatherings was now fighting for his life. Well wishes came in from all over the world. He had his 99th birthday on June 13, and seemed to rally; I left on a previously planned intensive Holocaust study program at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies at the end of June.
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July 5, 2016/Jerusalem
‘I often wonder what this world would be like, if those six million had never perished.’ Frank Towers, 30th Infantry Division, Liberator
I’m in the City of God now, Jerusalem. It’s the anniversary to the day of my visit to Bergen–Belsen three years ago, when Carrol was being memorialized back in his hometown of Johnstown, New York.
I am studying at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, for much of the month with 29 other educators from all over the world. And although we just got started, one of the early takeaways is, think about what the world lost.
A Train Near Magdeburg Page 31