We talk about the story of human beings, of the ‘choiceless choices’ in the ghettos and the camps. About the will to live, about what it means to have nothing, from the perspective of the survivors. We discuss the ‘survivors’ guilt,’ but also the victory over Hitler and Nazi ideology, as seen in the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors alive and flourishing today.
I am learning so much, and I am eager to learn more. But today I learned that Frank Towers, Sr., age 99, passed away peacefully with his family by his side in Florida yesterday, on July 4, 2016. Independence Day.
*
Today in class I was given the opportunity to speak in an open forum, ostensibly to comment on my thoughts about our collective, moving experience in being guided through the museum.
So I began. I told the group that I had been to Yad Vashem before, and that it was because of something very special in my life. In 2011, Frank and I met over 500 people who were alive because of the liberators' intervention and efforts at the 'Train near Magdeburg' on April 13, 1945. Over 55 survivors were present, and later, Frank, Varda (the organizer and a train survivor’s daughter), and I, along with three survivors of the train, had a personal tour of the museum and its complex atop the sacred mountain at Yad Vashem.[*]
And as I closed my remarks with my new teacher friends, after a very long and emotionally charged day, I told them that a chapter in my life seems to have come to a close with the death of Frank W. Towers only 24 hours before.
July 8, 2016/Jerusalem
It’s Friday, and I’m invited to the Great Synagogue here in Jerusalem as a guest for Shabbat services.[*] I have a guidebook with English, but I just follow the service in Hebrew, even though I don’t understand any of it. Somehow this symbolizes my state of being right now. Almost half a world away, Frank is being bid goodbye by his family and friends, as the cantor begins to wail here. My eyes well up, and a single tear begins its run. I am powerless to push it away.
*
It has been an extraordinary day. It began with a tour of the Old City on foot with a very knowledgeable guide who is also an archeologist here in Israel. We walked near the ruins of the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, and saw the remnants of the mikvah, the ritual purification baths a pilgrim would use before he could go near the Temple. We walked up the steps hewn into solid bedrock where a young rabbi named Jesus strode. At the Western Wall, I took it all in, and approached the site which for Jews is closest to the Holiest of the Holies. This has great significance; God dwells here. For the souls of Frank, and Carrol, and George, my friends, the liberators, and for my survivor friends who have passed, I placed a scrap of paper with my prayer for their souls into a crevice in the millennia-old stones. I did the same for my blessed mother and father, for though the loss is now tempered, it has never completely dissipated.
I moved on to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the church built over Christ’s Crucifixion and Tomb. Incense blasted me as I moved into the doors. Jesus entered into Jerusalem the day after Shabbat, Palm Sunday, in a very tense political situation. We know how that turned out, and I am at the very place where a Jewish sect shortly after his execution would grow to become one of the world’s largest religions—I’m free to walk about and drink it all in. And at this place I left the same petition, maybe hopeful that the questions that have perhaps distanced me from my own religious upbringing might be somehow answered. Why are the guiltless and the good afflicted with suffering? Why are the innocent murdered, while perpetrators live out long lives? What about the role of my own church in the age-old persecution of the Jewish people? Where was God in Bergen–Belsen? Is it right to ask these questions?
*
At the Great Synagogue at sunset, I try to enter into a sanctified presence again in a more focused way, but I am finding it difficult. These thoughts come rushing forth, the same thoughts and questions I have entertained for years. But there is also another thought right now, and here it hits me like a steamroller.
The last liberator at the train has passed, and here in the synagogue I am confronted with the enigma of the role I played in bringing the survivors and their descendants—certainly in the thousands of them now—together in person or in spirit with these old men in the sunset of their lives. But my centrality as the connector in this story does not become clearer to me in this attempt at deep communion with the Almighty; it remains hidden behind a fog that I cannot push away.
I recall again the experience of coming to the Holy Land for the first time, where Frank had met with over 500 people who would not have been alive today had it not been for the swift arrival of the soldiers of the 743rd Tank Battalion and 30th Infantry Division of the US Army. People are able to reach out and touch one of the actual soldiers who personally saved their families from annihilation; a woman was sobbing right behind me through much of the ceremony. Another woman, a granddaughter of one of those survivors whose name I cannot recall, stopped me. She thanked me and told me that my name meant something along the lines of ‘mystery of God.’ This struck me hard then, and it remains something that now roars forth in my turbulent state of mind.
The sun has set. The service is over.
*
Back at the hotel at the Friday evening Shabbat meal with the educators, we continue our meditation to enter into communal spirit to usher in an atmosphere of holiness and peace. We break bread, have the meal and conversation together, but I’m very quiet at the end of this long day. The mystery remains.
The hotel this evening in Jerusalem is jam-packed with Jewish families settling in for Shabbat—noisy, crowded, and together to bring in the Sabbath. Underlying the ebb and flow of activity all around is the disquieting undercurrent inside me about the fact that this day has arrived, the day that the last train liberator, the last soldier reunion organizer, is being buried. Tonight I am engulfed in a profound heavyheartedness, this loss, this questioning, and this wondering.
What does it all mean? What am I doing here?
The giant dining room next door breaks out in rhythmic hand clapping and voices singing a song of happiness, symbolizing the togetherness and communal unity that closes out the Shabbat meal. I glance at the time; at this very moment back home, my old friend, the one who would lead me to the head table of every soldiers-survivors reunion banquet he hosted, is being lowered into the earth.
*
Later, I awake with a start in a bed that is not my own. A newborn is wailing somewhere nearby. The hotel here in Jerusalem is filled with Jewish families in town for Shabbat, full of young families, young children. But though I have been jolted awake, nothing close to annoyance enters my being. Lying in the dark, I feel a warmth deep within my soul that is cutting through the sadness; in the crying of the baby and the voices of the children outside of my door I hear the song of the angels carrying Frank, and all the liberators I was privileged to know, onward and upward. These children are their legacy, and in this moment I know that I will perhaps never understand God’s will or why I was chosen to bring the soldiers together with the thousands of people alive on the earth today because of their deeds, but the real epiphany is that it does not matter—
He wanted me here in Jerusalem for this moment, when the last liberator left me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘What do you want the world to be?’
I reached some of my final revelations in the summer of 2016 as the writing of this book drew to a close while I was studying in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. My fellow educators and I heard from dozens of excellent scholars and presenters in the field of the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, of antisemitism through the ages, and learned from the nuanced dissections what we thought we knew about the Holocaust. One of our final lectures was from Dr. Yehuda Bauer, who at age 90 I consider to be the godfather of Holocaust historians. Sitting six feet away from me was a man who narrowly escaped the Holocaust himself, coming with his family
in 1939 to the Palestine Mandate before the window closed. He became active in the resistance to British rule, and later fought in Israel’s War for Independence. Early in his career he was challenged by Abba Kovner to study the Holocaust when few others were doing it. He mastered many languages, and it was he, after years of research, who concluded that the Holocaust was a watershed event in human history.
Today, sitting in his presence, and listening to him, I got the feeling that I was listening to a philosopher, one who also had been milking cows on a kibbutz for the past 41 years.
So the question came, as it always does—
What is the overarching lesson that we should take away from the study of the Holocaust?
To paraphrase his answer, he simply said, ‘There is no lesson, except not to repeat it. The Shoah is used, all the time, for various agendas and causes…okay, fine. But there is no lesson.’
And I think I get it. When we talk about the Holocaust, its sheer magnitude and ‘unprecedentedness’ denies us the comfort of walking away with an overarching ‘lesson.’ ‘Bullying gone wild’ it was not. Instead, he continued, ‘Maybe the real question to ask yourself, and ask your students, is this—What do you want the world to be? And then, maybe it is time to introduce them to the study of the Holocaust, because maybe the Shoah is the exact opposite of what they envision for their world, unprecedented in scope and sequence—but it happened, which means it can happen again.’
*
When we got back to the hotel to pack our bags and have a final evening to ourselves, we found out that for a few hours, we could not even cross the street to go back out—our hotel was now right on the route of one of the largest ‘gay pride’ parades in the world, right through Jerusalem. Security was tight; last year, a religious maniac stabbed six, and one teenage girl died here. But standing on the second-story hotel balcony, I could hear Dr. Bauer’s words echoing in my ears, reminding us that democracy is not only very fragile, it is hardly even out of the cradle in the backdrop of world history. But what sets democracy apart from every other experiment in history, in its pure form and in theory, is its defense of minorities. It doesn’t exist yet, but maybe this form of government needs to be protected, and nourished. And maybe this is what the soldiers were fighting for. The world does not have to be united, and, in fact, it never has been and never will be. We argue and we disagree all of the time. That is as it is, and as it should be. At the end of the day, we either kill each other, or we live, and let live.
We decide.
I had never seen a so-called ‘gay pride’ event before, so as I watched, there was another revelation. For over an hour, my fellow educators and I witnessed miles and miles of this parade of young and old, of men and women, smiling and cheering and singing; I’m quite sure that many participants, and maybe even most, were, in fact, heterosexual. And for me, this experience became a metaphor for our common experience here in Jerusalem—from that hotel balcony, we were witnessing what simply was a massive celebration of life. In studying the Holocaust together, we have plumbed the depths of the abyss that humanity is capable of, but not because of a fascination with evil and death; rather, it is because of the opposite, because of our commitment to humanity. For me also there is this burgeoning sense of righteousness in promoting the men who made a difference with their sacrifices in slaying the Nazi beast. And these American soldiers who encountered the Holocaust were not some kind of super-action heroes who arrived on the scene to save the day, just in the nick of time. As you have read, there was no plan, and they had no idea. What matters more is what they did when they encountered this trauma deep in a war zone with people still shooting at them, and later committing themselves in their sunset years to reaching out to others, so that, in Dr. Bauer’s words, the formally ‘unprecedented’ watershed event is not repeated. And maybe it’s time for a good long look at the world we live in today.
I have been on a journey that has consumed half the career that I never even set out to have. I have been joined by many along the way, and I thank the reader for also sharing it with me; that afternoon in Jerusalem, I parted with my educator friends with a final word in our closing discussion:
We are the new witnesses. We bear an awesome responsibility when we become aware, when we teach, when we communicate with others; now, more than ever, what we do matters, especially in entering this world of the Holocaust—because there is no past, and it is never over.
We are shaping human beings. We are cultivating humanity. There are always the children, the young; there is hope amidst all the darkness in the world. The tunnel can lead to the light.
You decide.
Epilogue
A Letter To The Tankers
Kloster Kreuzberg, Germany
10 July 1945
Tankers of the 743:
You have accomplished your mission in Europe. You have accomplished it only as great soldiers could. Never, from the day you hit the Normandy Invasion Beach until this day, have I had any doubts as to your courage or your willingness to sacrifice your lives for those of your comrades.
‘We Keep The Faith.’ Yes, you have kept the faith of those who died in Flanders Field in '17 and '18, of those who died in the water and on the sands of Omaha Beach, of those who died beside the hedgerows of Normandy, of those who fell in the orchards and farmlands of France, Belgium, and Holland, of those who threw their soft bodies against the steel and cement obstacles of the Siegfried Line, of those who pushed to the Roer, froze in the bitter winter campaign of the Ardennes, and of those whose bodies were strewn from the Roer River to the Rhine and from the Rhine to the Elbe River.
You have kept the faith your loved ones had in you, your country had in you, Colonel Upham had in you, and I had in you.
Never has a man had the opportunity of working with and associating with a finer group of officers and men than you of the 743rd. You have met and defeated the best the Germans had. Now, many of you will meet and defeat the best the Japanese have.
My prayers go with you.
WILLIAM D. DUNCAN
Lieutenant Colonel, Infantry
743rd Tank Battalion,
Commanding.
*
A schoolkid once asked a survivor I know if anything good came out of the Holocaust. The survivor thought a minute, because it was an important question, and replied, ‘Yes. My rescuers.’
And here is where the story of the ‘Train near Magdeburg’ will end, for now. When we talk about the Holocaust, the sheer magnitude of it, there is no happy ending. For each one of the 2,500 persons on the train who was set free, another 2,500 perished, most long before the Americans set foot upon the continent. And yet, at the end of the day, if we can say that somehow the soldiers and survivors in this book taught us something, perhaps the meaning is echoed in that three-word response.
I have found that in some educational circles the role of the American liberator is presented almost as an afterthought, and I would have to agree that when one is drawn into the unfathomable study of the Holocaust, liberation perhaps figures as a literal nano-episode. They were not rescuers, in the formal sense of the word—that title is reserved for those without weapons, who risked their lives and usually the lives of their families by hiding Jews or some such noble action—but the nobility of the would-be rescuers who had weapons, the ones still fighting and being killed, the ones wholly unprepared for the catastrophes that played out before them on an hourly basis in April 1945 deserves a larger place in our national examination of the essence of what, indeed, ‘greatness’ is all about. And here, I hope that the lesson is also one of humility; as they themselves stated in this book, it’s not about hero worship, or glorifying the liberator as some kind of savior. Many of the liberating soldiers would resist this, to the point of rejecting the term ‘liberator’— ‘It all sounds so exalted, so glamorous,’ said one. But they will all accept the term ‘eyewitness.’ [63] Eyewitnesses to the greatest crime in the history of the world; young men who ‘kept the fa
ith’ of their fallen comrades, their country, and to humanity; witnesses who did something about what they saw.
***
Soldiers featured in this book
Frank Gartner (Introduction) was a technical sergeant with the 743rd Tank Battalion. Fluent in many languages, Gartner was the translator for the battalion’s commander, Lt. Col. William D. Duncan. He was originally from Estonia, and resided in Los Angeles, California. He died in Alameda, California, in 1989.[64]
Clarence L. Benjamin, the major who snapped the ‘moment of liberation’ photo, was highly regarded by his men. He was from Oakland, California, and died in 1989 at the age of 77.
Carrol S. Walsh established a law practice in Johnstown, NY, in 1946. He served as City Court Attorney, Assistant City Judge, and as a school board attorney. He continued his law practice until he was elected Fulton County Judge and Surrogate in 1969 and New York State Supreme Court Justice in 1977. He retired after a distinguished career as a jurist in 1988. He passed away in 2012 at the age of 91.[65]
George C. Gross earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in English literature from San Diego State and received his doctorate from the University of Southern California in the early 1960s. Dr. Gross joined the San Diego State faculty in 1961. He was associate dean for faculty and dean of faculty affairs from 1970 to 1981 before returning to the classroom. He retired in 1985 but remained active on campus. He passed away in 2009. He was 86.[66]
Frank W. Towers served in Germany for post-war occupation duty. Returning to Florida with his family, Frank was self-employed and was later employed by the University of Florida, retiring in 1979. He was the President and Executive Secretary of the 30th Infantry Division Veterans of World War II Association, and co-founded Les Fleurs de la Mémoire, a foundation in France dedicated to caring for the graves of American soldiers who are interred in France and Belgium. He passed on in 2016 at the age of 99.[67]
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