A New York history educator restored a lost piece of history after unearthing harrowing footage that depicts US soldiers freeing Jewish people from a train bound for a Nazi death camp.
The locomotive was reportedly forced to stop near the town of Farsleben as Allied forces were bombing the area.This put the unwilling passengers in peril as the presiding SS officers had received instructions to execute as many of the captives as possible should they not reach their destination,Fortunately, the prisoners were saved after an American tank and Jeep appeared over the hill, whereupon a handful of Nazi guards fled the scene.
“I don’t want to say I am gratified or vindicated, because even without this footage, this is an incredible story,” said New York Holocaust expert Matthew Rozall, who discovered the footage in the US National Archives. “But to actually see it is another nail in the coffin of Holocaust denial, we hope.”The accompanying silent footage, filmed by one of the soldiers, shows the gaunt and battered passengers sitting outside of the locomotive in tattered clothes during the aftermath of the rescue.
“Everyone looked like a skeleton, so starved, their faces sick,” said George Gross, a tank commander present at the liberation.Jewish media outlets have since tracked down some of the survivors of the Farsleben train incident, some of whom recognized themselves in the video. The rescue operation occurred on April 13, 1945, after a Nazi train that was ferrying 2,500 Jewish prisoners from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to their presumed deaths at Theresienstadt was forced to stop due to bombings by Allied forces in the area.Meanwhile, Miriam Mueller, 82, who was four at the time of the ordeal, just saw the video last week. And while she didn’t see herself in the footage, “it brought up all sorts of memories,” the survivor told Ynet.
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