Holocaust victim

It was the 13th of April 1945, a train was rolling through the town of Farsleben in Germany. From the outside it looked like any other freight train. On the inside, it was quite another story.

2500 people were stuffed into cattle cars. Seventy to a car. Very little space for standing. No food. No water. No air. These were Holocaust prisoners, Jews, political prisoners, persons the Nazi regime deemed to have no right to live.

They went somewhere without knowing what or where. However, the next stop had been decided upon: Theresienstadt. A ghetto and concentration camp. To most of them, it would have been the end of the world.

Thereupon the train came to a halt.

It was there where American soldiers had discovered it.

The following events were hard to explain. The doors opened. Sunlight came in. And 2,500 people who had abandoned the hope of rescue knew that they were not going to die that day.

There was also a sergeant George C. Gross. When the prisoners saw the American uniforms, he recalled what he saw.

They laughed in joy – if laughter was possible – an outpouring of pure, almost hysterical relief.

Not cheering. Not celebration. Something dirtier than that. The noise one has when they are about to release a terror for the past years.

The soldiers were only a few days away from the end of the war. Little did they know that they would discover a train that morning. The morning was different than the others for the prisoners.

But it was.

An American patrol took another way and Two Thousand Five hundred people left Theresienstadt

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The Last Judicial Hanging in The United States

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