COURTESY PHOTOS
On April 13, 1945, two American tanks encountered a train near Magdeburg, Germany, with thousands of concentration camp survivors. George C. Gross, one of the tank commanders, reflected on the moment many years later: 'Each one of them was skeleton-thin with starvation, a sickness in their faces and the way in which they stood. Little children came around with shy smiles, and mothers with proud smiles happily pushed them forward to get their pictures taken. I walked up and down the train, seeing some lying in pain or lack of energy, and some sitting and making hopeful plans for a future that suddenly seemed possible again.' Maj. Clarence Benjamin took this photo just as a few of the prisoners realized they had been rescued.

Buddies George Gross of California and Carrol Walsh, formerly of Johnstown, were commanding the tanks that freed more than 2,000 concentration camp survivors from the train.

COURTESY PHOTO
Alexandra Keston as a child, shortly after her liberation, walks with her mother and father in Belgium. There, she tasted freedom and ice cream for the first time, 'and it was delicious,' she said.

Freedom

Published on 5/28/2006

By KONRAD MARSHALL
kmarshall@poststar.com
Associated Press

The U.S. Army was driving its way eastward through Germany at the end of the second great war, when a small task force came upon a strange, despairing scene in a wooded ravine.

Two tanks, one commanded by Carrol Walsh of Johnstown, stopped dead in the morning sun. There, on the tracks, was a gathering of exhausted, starving people, lying on the ground near the stinking sidecars of a freight train. Some were already dead.

"We were moving forward, pursuing German troops, cleaning up pockets of resistance," said Walsh, now 87. "We were in combat, on the move, and somehow we just came across this train."

Alexandra Keston, now 67, who was on the train with her parents, remembers watching the few remaining SS soldiers -- her captors -- drop their guns and run without a firefight.

Keston was just a child, but knew she was free.

"The only thing I remember of that day was picking up the gun," Keston said. "I was only 6, but I wanted to shoot the Germans."

A great stir went through the strange camp. According to witnesses, on that day -- Friday, April 13, 1945 -- the sickly figures began to comprehend their liberation. They laughed and cried in a simultaneous display of happiness and hysterical relief.

A commanding officer ordered nearby farmers to stay up all night to get food to the survivors, and saw to it that bedding was made available. They stood proudly, introduced themselves to the Americans and offered their hands for shaking. They took advantage of a cold stream nearby to wash.

Piece by piece, over the next 24 hours, the story emerged.

Nearly 2,500 people had been packed into boxcars a week earlier at Bergen-Belsen, the notorious death camp where Anne Frank was buried in an unmarked mass grave.

The train had gone back and forth across Germany, avoiding Allied air raids and interceptions -- its human cargo to be used in exchange for German prisoners, or exterminated.

The taking of the train was a small police operation, but it would not be forgotten easily.

It would be remembered vividly 61 years later -- by Keston, in Australia; by Walsh, in Florida; and by Walsh's family, in Hudson Falls -- thanks to Matt Rozell, a teacher at Hudson Falls High School.



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Matt Rozell's classroom is a shrine to 20th-century battle, decorated with old recruitment posters, reprints of wartime newspapers, propaganda and maps of Europe.

Rozell is director of the Hudson Falls High School World War II Living History Project, a teaching tool he started in the 1980s as a survey sent home with his students. It was designed to get them interested in their own history -- to make World War II more than a sound bite in the 5,000 years' worth of history high school students have to absorb -- but it has since evolved into a detailed Web site, chronicling local stories of service and war.

"There's some really colorful, vivid things these people remember," Rozell said. "When I hear it, I just can't believe what has happened to people all within a 5-mile radius."

Walsh, now a resident of Florida, lived for a long time in Johnstown, and his grandson, Sean Connolly, was one of Rozell's students.

A few years ago, after Connolly came forward, Rozell interviewed Walsh for two hours.

"We sat and watched the interview as they were taping it," Connolly said. "I think our entire extended family was very excited that Papa had sat down and talked to someone on tape."

That's when Rozell first heard the tale of the "death train."

From there, Rozell spoke with one of Walsh's war buddies, George Gross of California, who had written about that day extensively and constructed a detailed account of the event: "A Train Near Magdeburg." A world away, Keston found the story on her home computer.

"I put the story up on our Web site," said Rozell, "but I didn't have any inkling something like this would happen."

Nor did Walsh, it would seem.

"I never imagined that I would ever contact or hear from anyone who was on that death train so many years ago," Walsh said.

"It's amazing. Hard to believe. I never thought much about it through the years. At the time, it was just another day in

combat."



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Alexandra Keston remembers little about life in a concentration camp.

She remembers lining up for roll call every morning. She remembers falling ill. But she doesn't remember the horrors of her week in a boxcar on that train.

After her liberation, Keston and her family lived in Belgium for a time, then moved to Australia when the Korean War threatened to erupt into a world conflict. She kept her story close to her chest for many years.

"I felt -- how would say it? -- unfortunately unique. I couldn't cope with it," Keston said. "When you were growing up, no one identified that they had Holocaust experiences. In Australia, I thought I was the only one. There was no support network."

When her parents finally passed away, Keston realized a great chunk of her personal history had died with them, so she joined a child survivor movement and began researching her past.

Staff at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial filled her in a little.

Keston (then Friedman) had arrived at the camp with her parents in 1943, and was placed in the "Sonderlager" -- a special camp for Jews with foreign connections. They were kept in strict isolation, but they did not have to work. They were to be used in exchanges for German prisoners.

The people at the Memorial didn't know much more. One of them, however, had read a story called "A Train Near Magdeburg," on the Living History Web site of a little school in upstate New York. The Web site even had pictures.

"When I opened the Web site and looked at the photographs of the place of my liberation, I was in a daze," Keston said. "It didn't trigger anything. It's so deeply blocked. But the whole experience, viewing them. I just burst into tears."

Sixty years after gaining her freedom, Keston had found a pivotal moment in her life re-created in words and pictures. Numbers were called, e-mails were exchanged and, within weeks, the circle was complete.

"It's just absolutely incredible that all of this has happened," she said. "Matt Rozell has done a beautiful thing for me. I've always had a deep love of the Americans, and that's stayed with me. Making this connection with these men, and finding them to be such lovely people, has completed that picture. It has just been a beautiful ending."



MORE INFORMATION

Further reading

For further information, including one soldier's story "A Train Near Magdeburg," more photographs of that day and a 2001 interview with Carrol "Red" Walsh, visit the Hudson Falls High School World War II Living History Project at www.hfcsd.org/ww2.

Tell your story

If you have a World War II story in danger of being lost to history, Matt Rozell of Hudson Falls High School may be interested in recording an account of your experience.

For more information, call 747-2121.



Editor's note: Many of the details in this story were garnered from previously recorded interviews and testimonies from George Gross and Carrol Walsh, with the help of Matt Rozell of Hudson Falls High School.