The date May 4th, 1945 will forever be etched in their memories, and now it will be forever etched in ours. That fateful day toward the end of World War II was the day American soldiers liberated Gunskirchen Lager, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
On Sunday, March 10th, 2013 my sisters and I were privileged to attend a “reunion of sorts” between our father, Joseph Rosenfeld, an 82-year-old Gunskirchen survivor, and Alan Moskin, an 87-year-old Jewish World War II veteran who took part in the liberation of Gunskirchen.
Joseph Rosenfeld, 15 years old at the time of his liberation, met up with Alan Moskin 68 years after the event, in a little bagel store in Rockland County, New York. It was an emotional meeting for all who attended, as they recounted stories from different sides of a world that had been turned upside down.
Joseph Rosenfeld, the former inmate of Gunskirchen, came to the U.S. after WWII and was inducted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War. After recently sending a donation to the Jewish War Veterans (JWV), the Rosenfelds received a copy of their annual calendar. Attached to the November listing was a profile on Alan Moskin, a veteran of WWII, born and raised in Englewood, New Jersey. The article told story of Moskin’s participation in the liberation of Gunskirchen as a soldier in the 71st Division of the American Army.
Rosenfeld, as were most of the inmates of Gunskirchen, was at death’s door on that fateful day. Typhus, lice, skin ulcers and devastating starvation had affected all the inmates. They had suffered through torture and death marches, as the Nazis tried to cover their tracks before the Americans moved in. And most of the events of that day remained a blur to him.
When Rosenfeld saw the profile of Moskin, he very much wanted to meet his liberator and express his gratitude. After contacting the JWV, they finally met and hit it off immediately and spoke of being at two different ends of the same event. Moskin relayed the horror of what he had experienced. He said that American soldiers were completely taken by surprise, not having a hint of the existence of these camps, nor the conditions of their inmates. To this day, he said, he was haunted by the overwhelming stench and misery of the barely recognizable people he saw in the camps. He spoke of being approached and kissed by living skeletons covered with lice and sores. He recalled, that despite the fact that he didn’t know a word of German or Yiddish, the words “Ich bin a Yid” spontaneously escaped his lips in solidarity with his suffering brethren. For 50 years, Moskin said that he could not speak of his experiences and suffered with symptoms that he now recognizes were most likely due to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rosenfeld said he was just 13 when war came to his native Hungary, Joseph, his four brothers and parents were being deported to Auschwitz when a bridge leading to the camps was bombed by Polish partisans. The Germans rerouted the train carrying the Rosenfeld family to labor camps. Two older brothers, Zelig and Marty, were sent to the front to dig ditches for the German defensive line. Joseph, Moshe and Abraham, along with their parents, were sent to Vienna to clear the rubble of bombings and body parts strewn on the streets. Later he and part of his family were forced to march 200 kilometers in the dead of winter from Vienna to Mauthausen without food, water, or proper clothes and footwear. Rosenfeld told Moskin how in desperation he left the line to pick up a snail on the side of the road so he would have something to eat and was shot in the wrist by a German, His mother found some rags and wrapped the hand in garlic for lack of a better antiseptic, and so Joseph lived to see the liberation and receive proper medical attention.
Through word of mouth, Joseph and his mother heard that his two older brothers were sent to Mauthausen and were able to locate them, but they were shells of their former selves on the verge of death. Mother and son nursed the older brothers back to life with smuggled sugar cubes that she had sewn into hidden pockets in the hems of Joseph’s tattered pants.
Later Rosenfeld shared stories of happier times, of his experiences in the U.S., and of his pride in his children’s and grandchildren’s accomplishments. They agreed that there was indeed truth to the Jewish saying that “he who saves a single soul, is as if he saved the whole world.”
Moskin kept saying, “If someone told me 68 years ago that I’d be sitting in a restaurant in New York across from one of those survivors, I would have said they were crazy.”
By Sheri Rosenfeld- Grunseid and Lisa Rosenfeld
