Today we interviewed our first survivor from the train for this trip.
John Fransman was seven years old in April 1945. He remembers when his family had been ordered to leave their home to “work in the German war effort.” They were promised a good home, fair pay, and so on … when of course they were really being sent to slavery and deprivation in the concentration camps. They were imprisoned first at Westerbork and then at Bergen-Belsen, where John’s father died of starvation.
He remembers that people at Bergen-Belsen were dying faster than they could be buried, so there were stacks of dead bodies all around.
One day word reached John’s mother that it would be possible to leave the camp on a train … a train to where? They did not know and most did not care — it was a way out of Bergen-Belsen!
(This was a remarkable insight for us since we have assumed everyone on the train had been forced into it. Apparently some were given a choice in the matter!)
Matthew Rozell talks with John Fransman as Mike Edwards watches Joe Hammers (offscreen) set up the main camera.
John in his own words:
“My mother thought it would be better for us to… get out of the camp, because conditions were so awful. We went on this train and it went through the German countryside. It was going eastward — we didn’t know where. Some days it would go forward and then retrace some of its steps — it was going backwards and forwards…”
John and his mother learned later that the Nazi train soldiers had been ordered to transport everyone to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia where a new extermination center was under construction. Then the Nazis on the train received new orders as the Allies approached: drive the train over the destroyed bridge north of Magdeburg and drown everyone in the Elbe River.
But then the train stopped!
“… we saw the German officers of the train… they got together, were all tearing up their papers and they were burning them — having a little bonfire. They took off their uniforms and then they disappeared … they put civi [civilian] clothes on and then they disappeared into the forest!”
“And thankfully, yes, the Americans found us in good time …!”
Lee Shackleford, John Fransman, Mike Edwards, and Matt Rozell.
John observed, quite seriously, that you can see in his height the effect of poor nutrition in his early life. The other guys in the photo were indeed blessed.