With U.S. Army veteran Alan Moskin, who talked about being among the liberators of the Gunskirchen concentration camp, at Temple Beth Ahm on May 3, are, from left, Maya Solarski of Aberdeen; Ashley Arbital and Heather Goldfarb, both of Marlboro; Helene Albertson of Old Bridge; and Holly Goldfarb of Marlboro.
Photo courtesy Temple Beth Ahm
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May 26, 2009
It was the insidious message of Holocaust deniers that compelled a concentration camp liberator to tell his story after 50 years of silence.
In May 1945, Sgt. Alan Moskin and the members of the 66th infantry, 71st division, of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army approached a large barbed-wire enclosure in Austria. They had reached Gunskirchen concentration camp, a subcamp of Mauthausen.
What Moskin saw that day is still the stuff of nightmares.
“I was 18 — a boy soldier — when I became a liberator,” Moskin, 83, told NJ Jewish News. “I saw what the worst of what humanity can do. I’ll never forget the horror. It left a mark on my heart.”
The atrocities have haunted his dreams for decades, and Moskin never spoke of Gunskirchen until 13 years ago, when the Holocaust deniers began to attract more worldwide attention, he said.
Moskin, a resident of Nanuet, NY, spoke on May 3 at Temple Beth Ahm in Aberdeen as part of the Reform congregation’s Yom Hashoa observance.
“I didn’t talk to anybody for all those years because I was afraid to bring out all the disturbing memories,” he told NJJN. “And then the Holocaust deniers said the Jews made it up and it was Zionist propaganda. I started to take that personally. I knew what I had seen and I started to talk. No one can stop me now.”
Moskin, who speaks about his wartime experiences at schools, houses of worship, and community organizations throughout the Northeast, grew up in an “ethnic” Englewood neighborhood, where, he said, Jewish, Catholic, and African-American children happily played together.
He was drafted in 1944, and when his unit arrived in Europe, the men engaged in fierce combat throughout France and Germany. Moskin saw many of his buddies blown to pieces by German firepower.
But, he said, nothing could have prepared him for what they saw when, on a morning in early May 1945, they reached Gunskirchen. None of them knew about the camps before that day, he said.
“We weren’t even told we were near one,” said Moskin. “I have to make that very clear, especially when I speak to young people. They ask me if I joined the army to liberate the Jews, and I have to tell them that wasn’t the reason. We had no knowledge of the camps,” Moskin, who is Jewish, told the Beth Ahm audience.
But everything changed when the Americans entered Gunskirchen. The camp had been deserted by the Nazi guards several days earlier when they realized the Allied army was close.
Moskin said he went into shock when he saw the emaciated bodies — living and dead — of the inmates. There were starving, despondent prisoners begging for food, water, and cigarettes; many collapsed and died before the American soldiers could provide comfort or medical assistance.
“What I saw defied description,” said Moskin. “There was blood and skeletal bodies strewn all over. The reek of the dead and the dying was everywhere. I was in utter disbelief and couldn’t even process what I was seeing.
“But it was the most horrific sight I’ve ever seen or hope to see.”
One of his buddies said it was as if the devil had decided to take a vacation on earth and come to Gunskirchen, he said.
“There was a medic tending to an emaciated man who kept saying, ‘Why did they want to kill me? I didn’t do anything bad. I didn’t hurt anybody. I’m a good person. Why?’” Moskin said. “He died later that day.”
After the war, Moskin stayed in Europe with the U.S. Army of Occupation and learned more about the millions who perished. Before returning home in 1946, he also attended some of the Nuremberg trials.
“There were documents and testimony that proved the exterminations took place, and there were outright admissions by many of those on trial,” Moskin said. “And the deniers say it was all fabricated! What I saw at Gunskirchen was no myth. I’ll never get it out of my head.”
Now, he said, he speaks for every Holocaust victim and American soldier who saw the Nazi crimes against humanity.
“I’m their messenger,” Moskin said. “Intolerance, injustice, and genocide anywhere is intolerance, injustice, and genocide everywhere. It’s the young people I really want to reach, so their generation will get rid of hate and bigotry. My generation didn’t do it.”
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