Cheating the death train

A few days before Christmas, 89-year-old World War II veteran Grier Taylor of Batesburg-Leesville got an unexpected telephone call.

The woman on the other end of the line spoke halting English, but her message was clear: She wanted to thank Taylor for helping to save her father’s life.

Her father, now a physician in Israel, was a 14-year-old boy on April 13, 1945 – one of about 2,500 filthy, starving prisoners of Germany’s infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The suffering souls – 700 of them children – had been packed into boxcars in a veritable death train. They were bound for an uncertain future in another camp farther away from the front lines when they were liberated by advancing American troops.

“She said, ‘Merry Christmas.’ I said, ‘Happy Hanukkah,’” said Taylor, sitting at the dining room table of his tidy home on Lake Murray. “I thought it might be a prank call. But then she started talking about my unit, and I knew she was real. It was just a shock.”

The call was just the latest chapter in an almost decade-long effort by Varda Weisskopf and others to learn more about the “death train” and the U.S. soldiers who liberated it.

Her path to Taylor covered a decade and ran though an Upstate New York high school website, a retired soldier in Florida and, finally, one of Taylor’s Army buddies.

“I told him that I salute him for having left his family and gone to Europe to liberate the continent from the yoke of Nazi occupation,” Weisskopf wrote The State in an email from her home in Rehovot, Israel. “I called to thank him and told him about the story of the train. And I told him also that I extend to him my most heartfelt appreciation for helping to save my father.”

‘60,000 alive and mountains of corpses’

During the war, Weisskopf’s grandparents and father, Mordechai, were rounded up by the Nazis in Budapest, Hungary. In 1944, Mordechai was separated from his parents and taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwestern Germany.

Bergen-Belsen had originally been a prisoner of war camp – Stalag 11-C – for Russian soldiers. But in 1943 it was converted to house “elite” Jews from around Europe. They were to be used as bargaining chips to exchange for German prisoners and for other purposes, said Matthew Rozell, a high school history teacher from Hudson Falls, N.Y., who began doing oral histories of World War II veterans as a class project in the early 1990s. It was his class website – teachinghistorymatters.wordpress.com – that helped Varda Weisskopf on her search.

As the war progressed and the Russians began moving forward on the Eastern Front, the Nazis transferred more and more prisoners from camps in the east to Bergen-Belsen.

By 1945, “it was huge, massive,” Rozell said of the camp. “When it was liberated on April 15 by the British, they found 60,000 (people) alive and mountains of corpses. Literally mountains.”

Some estimates put the number of dead at the end of the war at 50,000. Still, Bergen-Belsen wasn’t considered a death camp like Auschwitz in Poland.

“They didn’t have gas chambers,” Rozell said, “but they had crematoriums because people were dropping like flies from starvation and disease.”

Six days in locked boxcars

Bergen-Belsen was located in the northwestern German province of Lower Saxony, near the town of Belsen.

As the war neared its end and the Third Reich was collapsing – with the British and Americans driving east across Germany and the Soviets closing in from the west – the Nazi regime decided to relocate many of the prisoners to a camp in Czechoslovakia. They were loaded into three trains – about 1,700 to 2,500 per train. It was a nerve-wracking experience for the prisoners.

“These people didn’t know where they were going,” Rozell said. “It was never a good idea to get on a train to places unknown.”

One train made it to the Czech camp at Theresienstadt. Another was liberated by the Russians.

But a third train – the one on which Mordechai Weisskopf rode – was stopped en route near the town of Farsleben, Germany, southwest of Berlin. The tracks had been bombed by the Allies, impeding the Germans’ retreat to the east.

There, the prisoners waited for six days and seven nights, packed shoulder to shoulder in locked boxcars, with little or no food and a single bucket as a toilet.

They were part of what Rozell called “the greatest crime in the history of the world – the Holocaust.”

Liberation for some, too late for others

On April 13, 1945 – Friday the 13th – some tanks rolled in and the Nazi guards ran away. It was a lucky day for some, as tattered, emaciated and utterly thankful people poured out of the cars and tried to embrace the American soldiers.

But for many others, it was simply too late. They had died in the car, and others would die in the coming days.

The American tankers were a reconnaissance element of the 743rd tank battalion. The battalion was attached to the 30th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army – the Old Hickory Division formed at Fort Jackson from soldiers recruited or drafted from the Carolinas and Tennessee.

Lt. Frank Towers was a headquarters liaison officer with the 30th Division. He saw the train first-hand and through the years penned a 32-page paper chronicling “The Death Train at Farsleben, Germany.”

“We had seen our own men killed and maimed, torn apart. We expected that. That was part of war,” said Towers, now of Gainesville, Fla. and the 30th Division’s historian. “But when we saw these people – walking skeletons, dirty, stinking, infested with lice and fleas – we didn’t want to get close to them. We didn’t know what kind of diseases they had. It was a miserable lot of people. They fell out (of the boxcars) like cordwood.”

The tankers – among them George Gross, who passed away in 2009, and Carrol “Red” Walsh, still living, who Rozell had interviewed for his class – had to move on the next day.

“We were fighting a war, not babysitting people,” Towers said.

So Towers got the job of finding transportation to take the survivors to a former Luftwaffe (German Air Force) hospital near Hillersleben, Germany. It was an 18-mile circuitous route because most of the bridges in the area had been bombed by the Allies or blown up by retreating German troops.

That’s when Taylor’s story begins.

‘The most horrible sight and smell I have ever seen’

Taylor was drafted in 1942 when he turned 21 years old. At the time, he was living in West Columbia.

He went through basic training and eventually became a litter (stretcher)-bearer with the 95th Medical Battalion.

The men of the 95th were trained to treat soldier for injuries suffered by poisonous gas. But by the time they reached Omaha Beach in Normandy 30 days after the D-Day invasion, it was apparent that poisonous gas – so deadly in World War I – would not be used in World War II.

So the 95th became a regular medical battalion, setting up aid stations behind Gen. George Patton’s Third Army as it raced across France. Taylor’s main job was to poke through bombed out buildings, looking for wounded soldiers or dead bodies, and then haul them back to the aid station for treatment or burial.

The 95th worked its way across France and Belgium, and then hooked up with the Ninth Army as it drove through Germany. It found itself in the wake of the 30th Infantry Division, operating the hospital in Hillersleben when the death train refugees started pouring in.

“When we took them off the trucks, we didn’t know if they were dead or alive,” Taylor said. “We had a tent set up in the yard for a morgue. We took their pulse and either took them to the morgue or set them up in the hospital.

“They had all urinated and (defecated) on themselves for so long. I was sick at my stomach, close to vomiting. It was the most horrible sight and smell I have ever seen, and I hope to God I never have to see that again.”

‘I was touching history’

Flash forward to 2005.

Towers met a survivor of the train living in Florida – Ernest Kan. He also began penning his remembrances of the incident. And then Kan came across Rozell’s website. Rozell and Towers began collaborating, locating other survivors and liberators, attempting to unite them.

Mordechai Weisskopf in Rehovot, Israel, saw Rozell’s website and called Towers to thank him. But because Mordechai wasn’t fluent in English, he handed the telephone to his daughter, Varda.

“It was a shock to me,” Varda Weisskopf said. “Two days I did nothing; I just thought about it. I felt like I was touching history to talk to the American soldier who saved my father’s life.”

She then joined Rozell, Towers and others in locating survivors and liberators and bringing them together. She even hosted a reunion in Israel last April.

Through Rozell and Towers, Weisskopf located one of Taylor’s Army buddies – Walt “The Babe” Gantz of Scranton, Pa., and he told her about Taylor and two others who served in the 95th – Bob Shatzof Upstate New York and Fred Nicoletti of New Hampshire.

Weisskopf called them all.

“Immediately, I wanted to call him,” she said of Taylor. “I felt it is my duty to talk with every soldier who was there, to thank them.”

Taylor finds that remarkable.

“Her crusade is beyond what I have words to explain,” he said.

The phone call brightened his Christmas.

Taylor stresses that he played a minor part in the death train story, and in the war, for that matter.

“I didn’t do all of that myself, you know,” he said, laughing. “I did have a little help winning that war.”

And as for those who say there wasn’t a Holocaust?

“I was there and I saw it,” Taylor said. “It was just pure hate, and I pray that we never reach anything close to it again.”

Video excerpts from reporter Jeff Wilkinson’s interview with World War II vet Grier Taylor