World War II memories
By JAMES WALSH

Alan Moskin marched eighth- graders yesterday across battlefields, down foxholes and into a Nazi concentration camp.

The students heard how hard it was for a 19-year-old soldier to leave a friend dying of his wounds and of the teenager's shock to find that his enemy was starving people to death, then stacking their bodies like firewood.

Moskin, 77, was one of eight people to speak to students yesterday at Felix Festa Middle School in West Nyack. He was joined by another soldier who also liberated prisoners from camps in Europe and by six other people who either survived or escaped Nazi persecution.

"We want the students to become tolerant of one another," Barbara Kalmar, chairwoman of the social studies department, said of the program that she's been running since 1984.

"That's probably the most important thing they could learn," she said.

Some of the students saw the speakers as living history lessons.

"It's realistic because he was there," eighth-grader Patrick King said of Moskin. "It's accurate."

His account was also a difficult one to tell.

"For over 50 years after the war," Moskin said, "I didn't speak to anyone about my experience in combat and later as a liberator, and that includes my mother, father, wife and children."

He paused and looked steadily into the stilled audience of 13- and 14-year-olds, nearly 100 in all.

"The reason was," Moskin said, "was that I was afraid of conjuring up all the memories. I closed up that part of my brain. I locked it up and threw away the key."

He said he found the key so he could reinforce history and counter tales that the Holocaust never happened. Moskin, a retired attorney, took his message earlier in the week to Yonkers students at a Jewish center in Westchester, as well as to Nyack students at the Holocaust Museum and Study Center in Spring Valley.

Yesterday, he took students from his boot camp training to the battlefields, where he was in the 66th Infantry, 71st Division of Gen. George Patton's Third Army.

"In another 10 years, there will be few left to tell the truth," Moskin said. "You kids will have to be our witnesses."

It was early May 1945 when his unit freed a prisoner-of-war camp in Austria that contained mostly British airmen.

They in turn told of a camp of Jewish prisoners a few kilometers away. That was the Gunskirchen Concentration Camp.

"We didn't know what they were talking about," Moskin recalled. "We didn't know anything about camps for Jews."

The soldier marched on toward the other camp.

"They were like skeleton-like creatures," Moskin said of the prisoners there. "I don't like using the word creatures, but that's what they were like. They looked like zombies, and as they increased in number we realized they were humans severely emaciated."

He recalled that they looked at the uniforms that he and the other soldiers wore.

"Some backed off. They were scared. They didn't know who we were."

They rushed up to him when Moskin told them in German that he was also Jewish.

"This is not a TV show, or a movie," Moskin said. "This is what me and my buddies experienced. ... I kept saying to myself over and over: How did this happen? How did the world let this happen?"

Student Heather Whittaker, 14, was surprised that the existence of the camps wasn't more widely known.

"I thought that was the reason they went to war in the first place," she said of the United States.

While the students were living lives 60 or more years removed from the Third Reich, Moskin reminded them that hatred was still prevalent in the world.

He urged them to stand up against racist remarks and against people who ridiculed others because of their looks, their religions, their differences.

One of the students, Danielle Leibert, said she had been the subject of racist epithets.

"I'm Jewish, and it's emotionally overwhelming to hear what they went through," she said of the concentration camp prisoners. "It's hard to put yourself in their position."

From: http://www.nynews.com/newsroom/042404/b0124liberator.html