 Okay, now to go live is there Yeah, yes. We're a teacher right here, right? She's like so great. No. She's sharing those. I've never gone on like that, right? Thank you. Yeah. Really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well. You know, if you tested it, you'd be able to see what it was like, what it was like, what it was like, what it was like, what it was like, what it was like, what it was You know, if you tested it, uh... now you just walked in the room, what were you gonna ask me? I think he was playing with it but I wasn't watching him. I Wonder if my wife Am I nope I am staying here taking care of the technology. She isn't either so you go I Yeah Oh Oh I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I saw spark there and I made up this silly survey was only two pages long And I said take this home and I bribed the kids with extra credit Get your grandpa your grandmother your eater your uncle to fill this thing in because I want to know where they were and what they did And if they have any words of wisdom for your generation And I can remember distinctly one of the one of the surveys that I got back in this Only in scraggly caps lock handwriting. He said I don't know how You could make anybody understand a nightmare like a world war two and that was the whole set of zero Okay So what did I do that throw in the drawer? No, I called them up and I begin to have these veterans come into the classroom And some of these guys have never spoken about their war experience outside of their their own buddies that reunions and whatever Even their own wives their kids certainly didn't know anything about it. But when the green child Generation began to ask those questions That's what did we get to open up a little bit and talk So that's that's in a nutshell how my project began and I really saw a spark with these young people and to connect them With the elder generation. It was a two-way thing the elder generation got a lot out of this encounter, too and Thankfully that that's been my looking a lot of schools around here oral history is a Is it really a good way to put your your students population in touch with you know, what really happened? And to make a continuity we began to put these interviews on on the worldwide web about three years after you graduated in 98 I literally would have the kids take VHS Video tapes or the interviews that I did or they did I'd have to type them out On the computer so they would literally be hitting the pause button on their family VCR I don't know what they're typing on back in those days But they would give me a transcript which we would then clean up at it and make sure Bread right and we put them on our school website So I had about 20 of those stories up and one day one of my students actually was this father Who said you should interview Sean's grandfather. He's coming to Hudson Falls for the summer and He was a tank commander World War two after the Normandy landings He fought for 10 months in combat all the way through the end of the war in May 1945 and This is him right here. His name was Carol Walsh originally from Johnstown, New York Carol was 22 or 23 when he lead in Europe. He was 24 when the war ended and When he had this encounter that I'm going to tell you about tonight I spoke to him for several hours actually two hours on a summer morning and And the entire time he was very animated. He was telling me Nightmare story after nightmare story, but he also told me funny stories about the guys He was with his laugh and like crazy slap in his leg Just the jokes who would play in each other and then the terror of combat, you know the next minute He did not even mention this photograph or the story I'm going to tell you tonight until his daughter said Dad did you tell mr. Resolve about that train? I mean, I was literally shutting the camera off to go home and he said wait Okay, I'll tell you the story and the story involves his good buddy here George Crouse In this photograph, it's near the end of the war and they're all smiles But when they were together in a single tank shortly after D-day the Normandy landings of which the 75th anniversary is this June They hated each other guts Okay Sherman tank inside of a light tank like theirs There's not a lot of room to maneuver and there were four or five guys four I think of his tank these two guys are stuck in some of the heaviest combat in Washington, Europe And they didn't get along it was actually kind of funny to listen to it and I wrote about it in the book too Red hated the army. He was totally did not like anything to do. He just wasn't an army guy George was a bite of book army guy. His father was as well George lived in California views from upstate New York. Like I said, they clashed but by the end of the war they were close friends So in this story telling red washes in his rocking chair at age 80 He said you should get a hold of my friend George because on this one day in April 1945 My tank and his tank by now. They were both their own They won battlefield commissions and they commanded their own tanks He said we were told to go investigate this train. It was stopped by the Elbe River It was just stopped there and there were people milling about and Talked to him because he took pictures Okay, so next slide. Oh, I forgot to tell you about me This is my last class at Hudson Falls High School in 20 20 June 2017 And they're great. It's lovely. I'm writing my six book. I got five of them up here. I'll tell you about them later You can buy it if you want I was a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum teacher fellow a lot of it had to do with this project and I'm doing The organization of American historians, which is national picked me as their history teacher the year for American history That was cool. I Toured Europe with this group Holocaust and Jewish resistance teachers program It was a tour that took me to all the places that I needed to visit for my book. It's very profound. There are about 30 teachers New York State Education Department Gave me their highest award for teaching the Holocaust and human rights and I got to meet the commissioner of education I got to sit in her chair in the boardroom down at the board of regents And I dropped a couple hints about what I thought about the Okay, I think they got it didn't do any good I went to Yad Vashem, which is in Jerusalem. It's the Israeli Holocaust For three weeks I studied the Holocaust with the top scholars in the world And I'll tell you what every time I don't care what subject you talk about, but especially the Holocaust I think Every time you think you know it all You realize how much you don't know I Learned a lot from these people all in one of the highest awards I Really prized was when the Greater Glens Falls Jewish community Gave me a clean the tree in my honor in my hometown And my hometown is Huffton Falls, New York where I taught history to Aaron and Kayla and others With my friend Doreen my colleague back there Up to fall to the community I grew up in and when I was 18 years old I can remember distinctly driving down to Main Street Hudson Falls with my dad He picked me up from school. He was a Huffton Falls graduate as well. He was a history teacher in Lesbos and He says so son, what do you want to do with your life? I was 18 senior springtime right in the bowl. I Said I don't know but I know I'm not gonna be teacher I think I was twisting the knife in his back a little bit and I said I'm getting out of Huffton Falls and never come back Seven years later. I was driving his old junk car around town living under his roof in the garage Driving up the street to Huffton Falls by your school where I was on the other side of the desk as a teacher That's where I that's where it was for 30 years So the town that I said I would never go back to watch what you say Because this group put this monument in my village park It's a tree planted my honor And this monument was given to me And it's a pretty moving day. This was last night Unfortunately everybody thinks I'm very under it Okay back to the story Okay, it's springtime. It's right about the time of the year right now Flowers are blooming the birds are singing the snow is going away the days are getting longer and The first American soldiers begin to stumble upon This thing that we now call the Holocaust. There was no word for it back in 1945 They the first camp that was entered I believe it was April 4th. It was a sub camp of Buchenwald Buchenwald was a major camp to where L. E. B. Cell was liberated. Of course his father died shortly before him On April 12th, the Supreme Allied Commander visited Ord Ruff and he brought with him General Patton General Bradley a lot of the top brass because they wanted to see for themselves And he made an impromptu speech. He said We were told the American soldiers does not know what he is fighting for now. At least he knows what he's fighting against Okay, the Supreme Allied Commander was it was like it was general Eisenhower And this photograph Shows him touring Buchenwald. He's pacing in the front row there and some of the bodies, which is just Tiny tiny amount of what they saw they general Patton went around the corner. This is a tough guy like guts and he threw up The next day on April 13th these two tangents rolled up to this train and they They Saw something beyond comprehension their major Major Clarence Benjamin was in a Jeep He said tank said gross and Walsh tank 12 tank 13 and 740 you guys come with me. There are another 18 tanks in the small battalion A light tank battalion can move very fast They worked in tandem with the 30th Infantry Division foot soldier infantry. They were like the spearheads So they're they're going fast and furious towards the off-river They had a final battle to fight at the city of Magdeburg a couple days after this photograph is taken but major Benjamin Pulled up in a Jeep. He stood up He pulled out his camera and snapped this photograph just as these people started streaming off the hill towards his Jeep Realizing that they have now been safe. They were concentration camp victims Refugees from the camp Bergen-Belsen. They had left Bergen-Belsen a week before The train had only traveled 60 or 70 miles, but it was stop and start was back and forth the traction blown out here Many people died on this journey. There were 2,500 people alive when they pulled up to this train Now I always tell the young people in the audience especially Look at the girl look at the little girl in the front There were about 500 children on this train. There are families on this train. There were Jews from all across Europe Look at her face. Do you see Joy in her face? No, what do you see? You see sheer terror and I speculate and you see she's looking off a little bit She sees those two tanks rolling up behind the jeep these two monsters clanking These women see the white star on it and they know they're safe. So His daughter said did you tell him about the train? She said no I did and he kept rocking in his chair This is red wash. She said well late in the war He started telling the story Now his tank was only there for one hour Maybe that's one of the reasons it didn't come to his mind when he was telling me all of his battle stories It just didn't register that hot It would later He said talk to my friend George in California Because he had a camera too they took other photos the photo that Clarence Benjamin took the major Got stuck in an official after-action report every day You may or may not be aware any battalion any Regiment and they would file these things called after-action reports It's just kind of like the daily diary of what happened and you don't usually see too much color in it They don't get too dramatic in it, but he pasted this photograph and nobody ever did that And it got filed into the National Archives. Nobody ever saw it until I had this conversation with Red Walsh and he had a copy of it. So did dr. Gross And It says the photograph insert below is taken by Major Benjamin the moment the first of the refugees the train became aware that their Liberation of their liberation they start to move up the hill towards the train There were 12 military German military guards including the train commander who gave up without a fight when they saw our tanks There were 2,500 pinnable oppressed people from all over Europe star beating ill some dying But all of whom were wildly happy and grateful to their quote-unquote liberators The tank crew passed out with food and cigarettes They could to help the sufferers and then he goes on for a couple more paragraphs and then it's on to the next day What happened on April 14th here are the photographs that George Gross took? You see families you see people up on a hill reclining George Gross says 16 of those people died in the 24 hours that his tank was with His tank was ordered to stay there to protect it over none in case the Germans came back You see kids these girls were Literally ready to pass out starved This woman we know her name her name is Gina Rappaport. She translated for George Gross. This is his tank She spoke English. She was from the Krakow ghetto in Poland There's a captured German soldier So I got permission to put the story on the website. I got permission to put Dr. Gross's photographs. He became a professor of English literature. I don't know if I I don't remember if I told you But Red Walsh became a New York State Supreme Court justice. So these are guys that did something with their lines afterwards and He gave you permission to put him on the school website. He helped him falls over to living history project and Four years four years after I put him up. I got an email from Australia this woman Was a seven-year-old girl on the train and I remember telling you to rate you and great parts In the lunchroom, I was so astounded this lady emailed me and said I Fell out of my chair. I started to scream I saw the photographs the day that I was liberated now. She was a seven-year-old girl She didn't remember very much about that day She remembered that she drew one of the German guards dropped a rifle and she picked it up because she wanted to shoot And her parents yanked it out of her hands. They all survived. Thank God They made their way to Australia where she lives today and she was able to connect with those two soldiers So that was pretty cool That was in The spring of 2006. That's how long ago So great. Well next thing, you know, I see I get emails from three more guys like boom boom boom and In the fall of 2007, I said, you know what red woffs is in Hudson Falls. You go to of Florida for the winter. I said he's hanging out with that his daughter's house Let's get some of these guys come up to Hudson Falls High School Dr. Peter Lantos is a world-renowned neurosurgeon a brain surgeon from Kings College in London He was a six-year-old Hungarian boy on the train His father died in Bergen-Belsen Dr. Mika Tomkiewicz is a Physicist and a climate change scientist. He is done in Brooklyn at Brooklyn College His father also died in Bergen-Belsen. In other words, their mom survived and take care of Fred Spiegel very interesting. He was in Bergen-Belsen with his sister. They were from Germany. They got out of Germany, certainly after Kristallnacht, went to Holland and that's where they were rounded up by the Germans. They came up. He was from New Jersey and they met Red Walsh on a nice fall afternoon in 2007 at our high school. They talked in front of the students. They all gave testimony. I contacted the press to let them know it was going to be happening. The next morning everybody went their merry way. It was a Saturday. I remember it was raining, pouring, hard but I was like on top of the world that we were able to pull this thing off and so many students got to witness this. I went shopping for a new computer at Staples and you know when you go shopping for a new computer at any big box store. The next thing to try to sell you is to monitor, even though you don't need it. So the salesman turns on this monitor and this was on the screen. I said, oh my goodness. That's my classroom. That's Red Walsh and this is all over the world. It literally went viral. By a time Monday morning came around. My email, school email had 60 new survivors from all over the world. Israel, Florida, Canada, England, who had been children on this training because it was a big story. And so many people tried to download the photographs on the school website like 20,000 times. They crashed the servers on something. It was pretty exciting. Fast forward, that was in 2007. Fast forward what? 12, 13 years. We've reunited about 275 of these children. We hosted three reunions at our high school. The last one was in 2011. We had 11 reunions overall. Many of them in the South because a lot of these survivors were invited to travel to the Old Soldiers' Reunion, the 30th Infantry Division, three continents. I wrote the book because I had to. It took me 10 years to write it. It's going to be a PBS documentary next spring. So yeah, I'll send an email out to everybody and she'll tell you to vote for it or something, so that gets on there. It's not done yet. Okay, anyway, took me 10 years to write your book. I knew I had to write a book, so I saved every scrap of information. And I knew I had to answer some questions. And I'm just going to throw a couple of the questions that I had that I had to figure out how I was going to bring into this book. What is the book about first and foremost? The book has four parts. The first part is about the Holocaust. The greatest crime in the history of the world. It says how many people were murdered in the Holocaust? What's the number? What do you think? I mean, what have you heard? Anybody? How many? 10 million is close. They say 11 million. How many Jewish people? They say six. Now, here's a question that they threw out at me when I studied at the shop. A 90-year-old historian threw out to me. He said, How do you know those numbers are accurate? Where did you get the six million number? Where did you get the 11 million number? The answer is there's all kinds of sources that you have to draw from. But one of the things to always think about, because Holocaust deniers are always coming at you with this stuff. I get hit with them by them a lot. You know what? Yad Vashem has only counted four and a half million. It doesn't mean the people aren't there. It means these people are still being counted every single day, as far as Jewish people. Okay? The other five million, you think, well, who were that? Political prisoners. They were also the homosexual population, the Roma slash GFC population, okay? Other undesirables. Okay, their numbers are kind of tiny when you compare it to the Jewish population. And that's a whole other thing to talk about. Everybody in my book, and my book is basically written by the survivors, is all in their own words, and the American Liberating Soldiers. It's all in their own words with my commentary. They tell you the stories, too. Okay, so to back it up a little bit, you can study the Holocaust as I have for many, many years. I started by studying World War II. But I opened this door when I talked to Red Walsh and he led me into this room where there were 12 other doors to go through. And once I stepped through one door, there was another 12 doors that I had to pass through. In the study of the Holocaust, you get out all these, I don't want to call them rabbit holes, but you learn how much you don't know. And the more you realize, the more applause you might. You know, what I would say to the kids is, six million, can you even picture what one million looks like? Of course you can. Okay, now think about murdering those people over the course of four and a half years. How does that happen? And who's responsible for it? Everybody says Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Sure, he had a lot to do with it, but I gotta tell you something. The roots of the hatred were there long before Adolf Hitler was even born. He was an administrator. How many people did he kill with his own hands? How many triggers did he pull? The answer is none. Oh, don't forget, 1.5 of those six million people were murdered by bullets, not gas chambers. Gas chambers began because the bullets were not efficient enough. How are the people freed on the train the snapshot of European jewelry persecuted by the Nazis and others? That was the challenge for me. Most were Hungarian Jews, but there were Polish Jews on that train, Dutch Jews, German Jews, even Greek Jews. Every single one of them had a different element that they brought to the story. How can I make people care about this story? Well, you need to listen to the stories, plural. And why is it important to listen to these people? What's going to happen when they're no longer with us? Because most of them aren't. Once people have absorbed the stories, do they have a moral responsibility to act on the lessons? In other words, why am I having this conversation with you? Why am I trying to teach young people about the Holocaust? Believing a story of Jihadi Baro in Yad Vashem. He said, you want to know what the big lesson of the Holocaust is? The answer is there are no lessons. Everybody takes the Holocaust and they say, well, I'm kind of going on a tangent here, but... Yes, we need to teach the lesson about what happened in the past so it doesn't happen again. But the Holocaust was not bullying any gone wild. The Holocaust started with words. It turned into something entirely different. Is there such a thing as being a witness when you yourself were not there? I'm going to argue, yes. I was born 16 years after World War II ended. But in 2003, I went here. This is the camp that the train transport, I'm going to tell you about tonight, originated from. This is a camp. I'll show you some slides of it today and slides of it in 1945. If you didn't see the big monument here or the memorials, you would think you were in and at a state park. There's Bergen-Belsen to circle in the green. The red dots you can imagine are concentration camps, right? Most of the biggest red dots are located in which country, the big ones. They're in Poland because that's where 3.3 out of 7 million European Jews lived. So this is where the major death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau, for example, that's where the quote-unquote extermination camps were. I hate that word. These people weren't pests, but these were murder centers. They were killing factories. Bergen-Belsen had an entirely different history. It actually started as a Soviet prisoner of war camp. And it evolved into something much different because of where it was located. It was far away from the advancing Soviet Red Armies, when many people were shipped there in the winter of 1944-45. This map shows you the date on it is April 18th. I stole from the World War II Museum in New Orleans. You can see the advancing Western Allies, they're closing in on Berlin, and of course the Russians are coming in the other direction, the Red Army. They've already liberated a long time ago in January 1945. They liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Germans tried to destroy some of the evidence of the other major death camps, death centers. A lot of these folks were being death-marched. By the time you got to mid-April, when the story takes place, millions and millions and millions of people were on the move. The British, on April 15th, 1945, crashed through the gates of Bergen-Belsen. Actually, as they were advancing onto the camp Bergen-Belsen, the Germans surrendered to camp, but they said, look, we have to set some parameters here. We're going to open the gates because you're going to have a mess on your hands when you come through. Indeed, there were 60,000 people in the camp, almost all of them sick, starving, emaciated, sliced, ridden. And the British put to sign up sometime later in 1945, and it's true, everything on here is factually accurate. 10,000 unburied dead were found here on April 15th, 1945. Another 13,000 have since died, all the victims of the German New Order in Europe. 800 people died on the day the British came into the camp. One week before, three train sports left Bergen-Belsen. One of these was liberated by the Americans at a place called Farsleben, near the town of Magdeburg, a city hence a train near Magdeburg. This memorial was erected a year, just one year after Bergen-Belsen was liberated. The people who put this monument here were the Jewish community who lived here. Many of the people who survived Bergen-Belsen, including some of my friends who were on the train near Magdeburg, they wound up back where they were incarcerated in Bergen-Belsen because there was nowhere for them to go. They became a displaced persons camp. I know some of my friends were there for five years after the war behind the Bart Warrior, before they could be allowed to emigrate to places like Canada or the United States or even Israel. Here is some kind of a graveyard. You can see some of the barracks building in the back because before it was a, there still is up on this plane in northwestern Germany, a German army base. So it was also an army base, and those barracks were where some of the survivors lived after the war. I know that all of these people died long after the liberation. How do I know that? I went there, I saw the diorama. It's a beautiful place. This brand new museum actually opened up right around the time we did our first reunion Hudson Falls in 2007. Like I said, it's like walking through a park. There's no building steaming here, original from 1945. This is some of my group. Now some of these pictures I'm going to show you next year from 1945, so that's one of them. And this is a few, I would say, less than a week after liberation. This is what my friends who were on this train, these young kids, had to walk past as they were getting on this train called Met. Train headed to another camp. They became used to it. These are pools where people would bathe. They would get their drinking water. They got sick here, cholera, etc. Here's a photograph nearby showing part of the women's camp. And this is after liberation. British army photographs. Beautiful stroll through the woods. Here's a duck boy in about the same place in 1945. That's me taking my little walk, thinking, thinking, thinking. What's here? You could feel the evil there. A drainage ditch through the woods. Hmm. That's 1945. About the same area I would think. There's the ditch. He's dead. This is German. It says 800 totes, 800 dead. What do you do with 10,000 unburied dead? You have to put them in the ground. It's a masquerade. Any idea who she is? Very good. It's Margo Frank. Her sister, we know who she is. The dire being Frank. Ian and Margo died about three weeks before liberation. And they're not buried there. I can guarantee you that. They're buried somewhere in here. I don't linger on those slides. But anytime you see a grave that's open like that, or you see a burst soldier, pushing a bulldozer, driving a bulldozer, pushing corpses, that's Birkenbauer. A thousand dead. It's a danger typist. These guys in these army carriers. The speed limit was five miles an hour. Because they couldn't have the clouds of dust carrying the typist. Very highly infected. This is what killed a lot of people. The typist is born by lice. Here's a drawing done by a guy who was actually on the train curving a body. He was a Hungarian Jew. He sketched like a madman at Hillersleben after he was liberated. This is the nightmare that the Americans had to confront with these people who were dying on them after they liberated the train typist. So why are there no buildings? What flag do we see flying there? The British burnt the entire place, the ground. Because of the infection, the disease. There's nothing there today. I know some of the teachers I was with on this very emotional trip, they were angry. They were crying. Because there's nothing tangible to remind people about what happened here. Except these masquerades that look like bounded over football fields. But you can feel it, like I said. So, I finally got to get to Bergen-Belsen. I met a German historian that I had been correspondingly for years, and in the background you can see my photograph. It's not mine. It's in the National Archives because the U.S. soldier took it. But my friends told me about it, and I was the one who helped bring it to life. He used them, and he saw my webpage. His name is Bern Horstman. He is the custodian of the Book of Names. Now, do you remember? I told you, well, how do you know? Six million. You have to literally count individual people in it. 120,000 inmates passed through Bergen-Belsen. Not all were killed or died there. He's the guy who has to reconstruct these lists. The Germans were meticulous record keepers. Do you remember Schindler's list? This train had a manifest list too. They counted all the people. His job is to rebuild it because the Germans destroyed everything they could before. They turned the camp over to the Allies. In his book, he gave me a copy of two volumes. There's 55,000 names in it. He's not even halfway through it. He's been working for years. But people come to him and say, can you tell me about when I was a little kid here? And he still wants to say, so you need to go to his website. So that's how a lot of these reunions came about. Now, I am going to give the floor over to the liberator, Carol Walsh, and he's speaking with an interviewer who interviewed him for National Public Radio back in 2009, actually. He's going to tell you the story the day he found the train. And the other person, actually the one who starts the story is survivor Steve Berry. He was a Hungarian Jew. He was 20 years old at the time of the liberation. So he remembers everything almost like he had a photographic memory. He had no parents to look after. His father had already been killed. I think his mother survived back in Hungary. He had no children. He had no wife. So he was a survivor. He was lucky and he knew it. But he remembered the exact moment when these two tanks came to hope. He got very interested in finding his liberators. When he saw that newspaper article, he knew how to get a hold. Well, he got a hold of us and we put him in touch with Walsh. So I just listed this and it's basically the story from each perspective of what this day meant. But it's also 62 years later when they met again. And the message that the American soldier has for everybody on the planet. So he's going to tell you that the train has now stopped near the city of Magdeburg. They're bound for a Teresian stop. I told you there were three trains. One of them made it to Teresian stop. This is the last concentration camp to be freed on May 8th. The last day of the war by the Russians. These people were, they had some value. You notice you didn't see them in the photographs of the typical Strait Pajama concentration camp type uniform. They were allowed to wear their own clothes. They had special value to the Germans. A lot of it had to do with some kind of documents in their possessions that would make them valuable to another country. So they were literally bargaining chips. Two or three trains, 6,700 total. One train made it here. The lucky train on Friday the 13th was liberated by the Americans. Another train for two weeks on the other side of the Elk River was liberated by the Russians. So Steve Berry is going to tell you about the liberation. Steve Berry went back into the passenger car on the train to sleep that night. The next morning he saw that Nazi soldiers had come back. Mounted SS troops came around, rode by the train and started to yell, Rouse, Rouse, get out of the train, get out of the cars. And we saw them putting up machine gun nests. So obviously even at that last moment they were still trying to murder us. Where were you at the time? Were you still in the passenger car? I was still in the passenger car. And no way would I have gotten out of there. In other words, if they wanted to kill me, they had to come into the car and shoot me. But they were with us there. I mean, they could see you in there, right? They could see me in there, of course. But see, it's a huge, I don't know how many railroad cars was needed to contain 2,500 people. But you know, it's a long line of railroad cars. It was, I mean, the only thing they could have done at that point is probably just keep shooting. But it just didn't make much sense even to them. So when they saw that nobody was getting out of the car, they just packed up and rode away. Very short while later, they came back again in the opposite direction. My friends and I says, oh, oh, we know what's going on. They are surrounded. These guys can't get out because they went from left to right and they just disappeared. So we were absolutely right because very shortly after that we saw the first American GIs. And were they in trucks or tanks? What did you see? Well, actually there were two tanks. I still get tears in my eyes. That's what it was. Right now I have tears in my eyes. And I always will when I think about it. That was the moment that you knew you were safe? That we knew that we were safe. And we were sitting, we found some matches in those German soldier's cars. So we had this tiny little fire going and we were sitting next to it and I was sitting there with this great big SS overcoat on and one GI walked down the embankment, came over to the fire, sat next to me, took out his pen knife and he cut off the SS insignia from my coat and slowly dubbed it into the fire. And if my voice break up right now it always does when I say that because it's a moment that is just never be forgotten. I don't know who the GI was but it was something that it just signaled something to me that maybe I'm safe and maybe the war ended and the Germans or the Nazis are defeated. What a symbol. It was an unbelievable symbol to me and all I can tell you is it still touches me very deeply and probably always will. A 24-year-old American soldier, Sergeant Carol Walsh, was commanding one of those tanks. He remembers the day they came upon that train near Magdeburg as much as he remembers anything from those endless days of fighting. Tired? I never thought about being tired. I can't explain that. You just kept going. I can't explain that to you. You just kept going. You didn't feel anything much. You remember seeing the train the first time? Oh, sure. I remember coming upon the train. Did you know at the time that these were prisoners or had been prisoners or that they'd been held by? Did you have any idea what they were doing there? No, I had no idea. I had no idea who they were, where they had come from, where they were going. Nothing. No idea. All I knew was there was a train with these boxcars and people jammed in those boxcars. No idea. Steve Berry knew, as one of the young Hungarian Jews who had been trapped on that train, that their luck had finally changed. The Americans were totally unbelievable. Because there is no other army in this world that would stop and help 2,500 lies-ridden, emaciated Jews to save them. What army would stop? Except the American army. I mean, this is a shooting war. I mean, these guys could have gotten shot 10 minutes later. The 30th Division stopped. Did they have any food for it? Whatever they had on them, and it was mostly a chocolate bar and cracker or whatever the K-Ration contained or chewing gum, they immediately gave it to us. And then, later on, they arranged for food and transportation to get us out. I'm Dick Gordon. You're listening to the story. Errol Walsh was one tired soldier when the Americans discovered the train of camp survivors, and they were still under orders to route the remains of the Nazi soldiers, so they had a problem. What are we going to do with these people? How can we handle this situation? Fortunately, there was another attached unit with the 30th Division. They were in the area. That battalion immediately went around the neighborhood there, getting food from the local farmers and bringing it to the people. And then, overnight or the next day, there were other units that arrived to assist these people and find shelter for them. It may be a silly question to ask from this one moment whether or not it stuck in your mind, but in the years after the war, did you ever think of that day when you came upon that train? Not very much, no. No, it was because it was just another day, you might say. I don't mean to put that down or minimize what was going on with these people, but it was just another incident, another day, and on you went. No, I didn't think about it much through the years and I didn't really think much about it until I had this interview with Matt Rosell, the history teacher in Hudson Falls, New York High School. My daughter said, why don't you tell them about that train? I hadn't thought even to mention the train to Matt Rosell, and I did, and as a result of that, that's how a lot of the programs and the connections with the survivors has come about. Carol Walsh talks about the high school history teacher Matt Rosell in teaching about the Second World War. Matt invited veterans in to speak to his students. That led to a website and eventually to an event, a reunion that included both veterans and survivors. Carol Walsh was there. It was quite emotional. You know what I said to them? Long time no see. Only 62 years. Yeah, that's all. It was quite emotional. The ones that I had met were very young on the train. A couple of them were, I think, teenagers. But for the most part, they were children. But you said it was emotional. I can understand why it was emotional for them. You guys, whether you knew it or not, were the saviors and the heroes. Well, let me stop there. No, not heroes. It all came about. It just so happened that Gross and I were the ones that our tanks were assigned to this particular scouting trip. Yes, those people look upon us as saviors. I don't know why. I don't feel like that if you can understand my feeling. Yes, it came about. Because we got there, yes, at that particular time, those SS guards took off and it was the end of their ordeal. There's no question about that. I mean, if you weren't the, you know, the sole hero who saved them and nobody's suggesting that's the case, you certainly, you and the other tank commander, you were the symbols of their liberation. Exactly. That's a good expression. That's a good description. Symbols. Yes, indeed. Yes. And so if it was in a way just another day in battle for you, when you say that your reunions have been emotional, why are they emotional for you? It's emotional for me when I think of where they were headed. They were headed to another concentration camp and extermination. And I get emotional now because I know what they went through and what it meant to them that we happened to intercept that train at that time. They're real people. When I look back, they were almost not like real people when I first encountered them on the train, on the cars. They were just a large group, 2,500 figures. Yeah. And now all of a sudden, they have names. They had lives. They had families. They have stories. I guess that's why I find it emotional. The Associated Press published an article about the reunion of survivors and liberators of that train beside Magdeburg. And that was the article that Steve Barry read. He'd been there. He'd been waiting a very long time to thank someone. And so he called up the high school history teacher and found out that Carol Walsh lived just a few hours away from him in Florida. And I was just so anxious to hug somebody that was liberating that train that I just couldn't wait to meet with Carol. I called Carol and I explained to him who I was. And I said, you know, I just have to come to you and I have to hug you. And he said, anytime, just please do come. Steve Barry will never forget that meeting. He brought with him two daughters and a son-in-law. We called on a cell phone. We called his home on a cell phone so that we are almost around the corner from you. So when we drove up, the five of us drove up to the door, Carol was already outside. Was it an emotional moment for you? 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's a very lovely person. But for some strange coincidence, or maybe it wasn't, we connected immediately. It's like we became true friends in a matter of a half hour and stayed that way. I called him on the phone. I exchanged emails with him. It's such an amazing thing that our lives were joined at that moment on April 13, 1945. All the years have gone by since we've had lives, families, jobs, whatever. Here we are. And now we meet face to face and recall together that moment when my tang reached the train. You know, I kept calling him my liberator. He says, I'm 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're my liberator. I actually have here in my studio, Steve, a copy of a letter that he wrote to you. And if you don't mind, I'll just read a couple of sentences. This is Carol writing to you. And he says, you're always expressing gratitude to me, the 743th Tank Battalion and the 30th Infantry Division, but I don't believe that gratitude is to serve because we were doing what we and the whole world should have been doing, rescuing and protecting innocent people from being killed, murdered by vicious criminals. You don't 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 money, your art, your family life, your families, your childhood, your dreams, and all your lives. Is this a beautiful person? You know, when I got the letter, I said, you know, I just can't 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's okay. That's right. I think, I can't believe today as I look back on those years and what was happening, I can't believe that the world almost ignored those people in what was happening. I can't 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 don't owe us anything. We owe them for what we allowed to happen to them. That's how I feel. My two buddies, well, dear buddies now, too. Carol died in December of 2012. He died in Florida. He hated the cold. He always went to Florida for the winter tag because he froze nearly to death and his tag during the Battle of the Bulge. He just could not stand the cold. I remember I called him up because I knew it was going to be our last conversation. He was kind of weak, but he was still trying to crack jokes. What do you do when you know your friend's dying and this is your last phone conversation? I started talking about the weather, of course. I said, it's really cold up here in New York. He started to chuckle a little bit. He said, I hope it's cold where I'm going. He passed a few days later. Literally two or three weeks after he died, Steve died. He had a car accident. Actually, it was a January before, and he lingered for a while, and he passed away. But I'm glad you got to hear their stories. George Gross, the other liberator, actually died on my son's birthday in 2009. I never met him. I was going to fly out to California because he didn't like to fly. But I'd never got the chance, but his son came to all these reunions, and we recently interviewed his son for the new film coming out. Yeah, so these are all my good buddies, and I really think this is an important story. And the year that I'm memorial day, 2009, it was called The Story with Dick Gordon on National Public Radio out of North Carolina, but it was a nationwide thing. And it became their most requested play this again thing. I think this is the day before, days before podcasts. They should rerelease it. I really feel strongly about that, especially when they talk about this letter. And the depth of where it came from in Carol Walsh's soul to actually, he was angry. He was angry that people were calling him a liberator and a hero. And he said, almost like, how dare people do that? Well, how could this have happened? Because he learned a lot about the Holocaust through all this experience that we had together. And yeah, what he said. So I gave this presentation to a group of people whose job it was to move the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum forward like their top development people. And the director of the museum, Sarah Bloomfield, who is still there today. This is about 10 years ago, it was 2010. I played this little video and I can remember some of the higher up people were looking at their watches saying, oh my God, is this thing ever going to end? They were doing it because they had to get on to some other business. And I said, hold your horses. Listen to what he has to say. And Mrs. Bloomfield stood up at the end. She wasn't talking to me. She was talking to her top brass, as she said. You people get that letter from the museum. Meaning, try and get Judge Walsh's letter. Try and get Steve Barry to donate it. And they did. So it's in the archives of the Holocaust Museum. It's that important. I don't know if it's on display, but you got to hear it being read. Anyway, profound thing. Something I like to bring out, especially when students are in the audience. This is our 2009 reunion. This short lovely young lady. She's alive still. She's Ariela Brojik. She was, I think, 12 years old at liberation time. She saw herself in one of the photographs. Because she recognized the sweater that she made from threads of worn blankets and burden belts. She lives in Toronto. Colorado recently passed away. He was six when he was liberated with his mom and his older brother, his father, his dad. He carried a lot of anger his entire life. He had definite PTSD, anger management. As you can imagine, right? But he said this really helped him heal. Fred, lives in New Jersey. He would come up to the high school quite a bit. And Elizabeth, she was actually from Holland too. So anyway, pretty cool stuff. Other major people, I only have a few slides left but I want to introduce you to them. Frank Towers. Remember I told you about Saturday, April 14th? The morning after the liberation. He showed up so that George Gross could leave with his tank and go fight the battle. Frank's job was to bring these people to an abandoned German Air Force base. They'd just been captured by the Americans. They had hospitals there. They had German doctors and nurses. And it had barracks buildings. So that's where these people wound up. About 10 miles away. Frank's job was to get them there. Frank became the secretary of this project. He was the one who tracked down hundreds of these people on his own. And of course, he was greeted as a hero. He went to Israel. I went with him. He met 55 old people who at one time were young children on this train. And the auditorium we met him in was filled with 550 people. Probably most of them wouldn't have been there if it hadn't been for the Americans coming onto site when they did. So you can imagine, he was there for two weeks. And he met everybody of Israel. He went up to the Israeli IDF, the Israeli Army Chief of Staff. He got a special tour. I went to Yad Vashem with him. He was treated like a king. When I was studying at Yad Vashem, he passed away at age 99. Leslie, my cells, my other good body. That's him at age 17, actually younger. But he was liberated at age 17. He's holding his revenge. That's his granddaughter. He was from Toronto. He would speak to young people all the time. He died almost a year ago right now. And I spoke to his widow. She called me up. I keep in touch with all these people still just like two weeks ago. He was a great man. Don't let my past become your future. It was his story with the young people. This little girl was three years old. Her mother died in Bergen-Belsen. Her father was already dead. She was adopted by Jewish women who didn't know who she was. Her memory of Bergen-Belsen is mud. And when the women cut all of her hair off her head because of the vice issue. And she wound up in Israel after the war. She heard about me and she came to the United States. This is taken up on Lake George. I'm one of the steamboats. She's a great lady. One of the top dancers in Israel for her career. And she's a Tai Chi master. She wields a sword. So you better watch out. Beautiful. Getting to the end here. This is Mr. Walter Gantz. Just when I thought. I came here from another American soldier because four years went by and I hadn't heard from anybody. After our last reunion at the high school in Hudson Falls in 2011 the secretaries had a phone put into my room. I mean the school district put a phone in my room with a line to the outside world because the secretaries I think everybody knows they're the real bosses in the building anyway. They were getting phone calls from all over the place. People wanted to talk to me. The phone rang during one of my free periods. I picked it up and it was this guy. He said, Man, Roselle, God bless you. He lives down the street in Pennsylvania. He's still alive. In fact, I talked to him yesterday. His name is Walter Gantz. Walter was one of the people who took care of these folks at Hillersleeve, the hospital. He said, Matt, I know a bunch of other guys who were there with me. So we interviewed him. And this guy lives down in the Bronx. His name is Luca Ferrari. Pretty good shape. He was telling the story of this little girl at the Hillersleeve camp. Here's her picture. Okay, typical of the children who were on the train, liberated. She didn't look too healthy, does she? Well, her mother begged Luca and his friends, these American GIs, to take this little girl home. They kind of like adopted her, would bring her food, and finally the mother said, take her to America, please, please. They had nowhere to go. Luca, they actually worked out a scheme. They put the girl in one of the GI duffel bags, but her head was sticking out. So it wouldn't work. They're going to go on ship when it's time to go home. So with my help, we're still, we're looking for this girl. Her name's Irene. It's about all we know right now. We've been looking for years. It'd be great to find her. She's going to wrap up a presentation. Yeah, we've been working on this film for about four years. And last spring, we finished up our second trailer for it. This is what you call a pre-production trailer. In other words, the whole film's not made yet. We're trying to raise funds. We have a lot of irons in the fire. It will happen for sure. I want it to happen by this time next year, because it'll be the 75th anniversary of liberation. Next week, my friend Mike Edwards, and I are traveling to Scranton. I've never met Walter in my life. Believe it or not, it's been eight years of conversations on the phone. We're going to Scranton because we found a new Holocaust survivor, a man who's 80 years old, and he's traveling with his daughter from Pittsburgh to Scranton, and we're going to meet at a restaurant a week from today. It's going to be all filmed. I hope it's going to be pretty dramatic. You may have heard of this survivor. His name is Judas Samet, if it's not ringing about. He was present at the Horrible Massacre in October at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. If you read the accounts, he was the survivor who pulled in just as the gunman was emerging from the synagogue, still firing around. And he witnessed it. And I saw the Washington Post article, and I realized he was on this train. So I called him. I actually found his daughter first, called him up. She's going to bring him to Pittsburgh to meet Walter Gantz. And Walter said, you'll see him talking this little trailer. He said, Matt, for 40 years of reunions when we got together, we talked about things that, you know, they were Maddox in the Battle of the Bulge. Guys with their legs blown off, okay? They talked about this, because the stress, the post-traumatic stuff hit them too, very hard. They were caring for young people like this girl Irene. They got very attached to these little girls and boys who would then die at them. So they never talked about it. So, I know Judah's father died in Hill's sleep. So we'll see how that meaning goes. I'm pretty excited about it. Anyway, here's Walter. Here's our trailer. We'll see some of the people I just introduced talking again. And then I'll tell you about my books and ask if you have any questions, okay? You know, at time, you're events that it would stay with a person all their lifetime. We seemed to be wrapping up our conversation. And I was about to turn the camera off. And, uh, Cheryl Walsh's daughter, who was present in the background, said, Dad, did you tell Mr. O'Zell about that train? And he said, No, I didn't. He had photographs that George had taken and Major Benjamin had taken. My father kept copies of those in his top dresser drawer from the time of the war to pretty much to the end. And I look back on that now and I think how unusual. Everything else about the war was put away. He didn't talk about the war very much and yet those pictures were something that must have touched him very deeply. I was searching for gun positions and all of a sudden I was attracted by this terrible odor that we couldn't think I was coming from. I was in a state of shock. I never saw anything so bad in my life. Lowered than animals. We were not having names. We were not considered to be human beings. We were treated like creatures whose destiny should be death. I kept asking my mother are they shooting yet? Some pretty important people coming out I'm sure will be made because it's an important story and I hope you like the trailer. This is my website. Right now I'm talking to a bunch of kids school kids in Germany who are actually going to school on site. One girl from English is fantastic. She is only 16 but she's trying to find this Greek survivor who apparently one of the German townspeople one girl at the time became close with in the five or six weeks that these people were on site. I don't think we're going to find him he's probably dead but you never know. So I'm trying to help her out here so that's the website. I do have a Facebook author page it's a good way for people to see what's going on if they're on Facebook. I'll get the story out. My first book was on the war in the Pacific interviews with men and women from Pearl Harbor all the way through Hiroshima second actually this is my second book I had to get out of it before it killed me. I mean it almost killed me right this book because it's a very personal story too. I literally wound up in a hospital right before school started in 2016 I think it was exhaustion but it was just one of those things I had that was like a maniac I had to get it done. The things our fathers saw, volume two this is a series which can be yeah this is volume two there's a lot of commerce flying over Europe pretty incredible stories there's actually volume three there's a slumber volume same thing but a lot of prisoners of war has been shot now volume four came out this summer it's on the war in North Africa in Italy up the bloody moon it's all a world history told by the guys who actually lived it saw these things nobody knows anything about this war but that's not tonight's talk but maybe some other time my next book which I hope is up this summer is going to be D-Day in Normandy I think there's going to be about eight books in this series so that's how I keep busy as a retired guy I wrote these two while I was still teaching I do have them here tonight any book you want is twenty dollars thirty dollars hardcover I got those two and the more you buy the more you save so I'll just throw that out there but after tonight's talk are there any questions or things that you want me to clarify yes sir there's a suggestion like the soldiers very surprising to discover the horrors of what was going on in my question to you what's your take on what the knowledge of what was going on for several years considering those levels of participation not just by the environment but like other approximate countries that were involved shifting people around at some level maybe generalizing power do anybody have any idea of what was going on the stories are there whether or not people wanted to believe them or act on them was another thing there's no question that higher ups in the U.S. government they were aware to a certain extent of what was going on but the actual magnitude if you're not there with your own eyes it's hard to believe it there are people who for example escaped from Auschwitz and the message got back to the United States of America and to the higher ups in Britain etc but you know not to use that behavior but the American military there's a lot of arguments about why didn't the U.S. Air Force bomb Auschwitz the railroad tracks going to Auschwitz and that's a legitimate question because it could have been done of course he had the war but it wasn't a military even though there were slave labor war material factories attached to the Auschwitz complex the whole thing from the American military perspective was our job is to get this war done and priorities and resources okay you think about these things not to excuse any of that but I guess to kind of answer your question people knew the American public the Holocaust Museum has a great online exhibition right now called Americans and the Holocaust what did the ordinary average you and me Americans know about the Holocaust as it was unfolding the technical definition of the Holocaust in 1933 when Adolf Hitler becomes chief of Germany and oh by the way he doesn't seize power by force does he he's democratically elected and these things unfold well how does this happen so if you read the newspaper accounts in New York Times Kristallnach is in there front and center on every major American newspaper in 1938 the Germans, the Jews of Germany they can't get out so you get all kinds of really good questions from students and other people why didn't they just leave well you know what not too many other countries open their doors for one thing there was one ship called the St. Louis that tried to get into Cuba then Florida it was turned back with 900 people a quarter of the people on that boat when it returned to Europe they were murdered were murdered in the Holocaust I don't know if that kind of needs to be a question but the things that Brad Walsh was talking about in his letter he's outraged how dare you call me a girl so I mean Michael argued it is here's these ordinary American boys that's not their job but they did something and again with military resources government they made the decision to do that there were some Red Army camps that were liberated these Red Army soldiers kept flying they didn't stop to do this yeah sure absolutely my whole thing was okay I'm going to write a book about really my experience in learning about the Holocaust as an American teacher and I have some things that I want to share with you but how do I tell such a a story of that magnitude with all these people that I know all over Europe so I really decided who's my audience I want to work on a young adult edition who's my audience the person who doesn't know anything about the Holocaust I want them to learn so much about the Holocaust and if you read the reviews on Amazon I'm hitting the target there so I want to teach about the Holocaust I don't want to make it too general so that the person who knows a little bit more I want everybody to learn something so the first third of the book is about the story of the Holocaust as it unfolds starting in Poland with an invasion what happens to this little Polish girl in her town what happens to her home how does she wind up burning bells so I take the Polish thing then I talk about what happened in Germany with my German Jews from their experience then I take it to Hungary Hungary was the last country invaded by the Germans because they were quasi-friends with the Germans for most of the war until they changed their tune in March of 1944 the Germans invaded on March 18 in between at the end of March in the beginning of July 1944 450,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered in Auschwitz it was cranked 25,000 people a day were being murdered in that murder factory and my friends who were Hungarians most of the people on this train were significantly lucky a lot of them had a similar story they were heading straight towards Auschwitz and the Germans blew the rails out and they diverted the train up through Austria where they wound up doing some slate labor on farms so little kids could work too and then towards the end of the war towards Bergen-Belsen and there was a special camp there so it was a miracle you know and Leslie myself explains this really well in the book it was his own book the parts it says there were three miracles in my life the first one was the parts that blew up the train to Auschwitz or the tracks to Auschwitz the second one where we had a choice to get out of another train one of them went straight to Auschwitz the other one had to Austria his mother wanted to get out of the train because the other family members were getting out of this other train they don't know where it's going and so they made their mother you don't talk back to your mother in some of these families in Europe he said no, you're coming with me and they got on this train and wound up in Bergen-Belsen that was a second miracle his third miracle was the day that he met his liberators at our high school so this is an interesting question I talk about that and I talk about the Holocaust then I talk about the American soldiers and what they went through that's a good chunk of the book and then what they did and what that day was like and then I redo it when did you want to first start fighting? it's gotten down later in life well I think when we first when I heard the first reunions I interviewed these guys in 2001 2002 when I started hearing from the grandmother about four or five years later I knew I had to do something with it especially after the reunions and I saw the students reactions but I wasn't ready because I was totally unready for it they had another chapter to it but maybe I'll say it in another book well I want to thank you for coming out tonight and uh good evening boss, I've read it very very powerful powerful story I'll see you tomorrow night I think we're going to end here. Step on, step on. Yeah, I'll just let you talk to me. Oh, really? He did deliver the wish call for a note, so that was nice. Yes, so there it is. Take care. Bye-bye.