As an officer in the U.S. Army’s 30th Infantry Division, Frank Towers heard rumors about Nazi persecution of the Jews. He dismissed them as propaganda.

“They couldn’t be doing this to the Jews,” Towers said he thought at that time. “That’s just not possible,” he thought — “until I saw it, like Thomas in the Bible.”

On April 14, 1945, the Catholic lieutenant encountered the Holocaust.  

Six days earlier, the Nazis had crammed a 50-car train with 2,500 Jewish prisoners of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and attempted to transfer them to Czechoslovakia. Advancing from opposite directions, Soviet and American forces unknowingly trapped the train between them. Most of the guards fled before two American tanks and a handful of infantrymen happened upon the scene at Farsleben, Germany.

Now stranded in a combat zone, the prisoners desperately needed medical care. The next day, Towers’ colonel ordered Frank to relocate the freed Jews 10 miles away to an abandoned German military base with a hospital. Air raids, artillery barrages and vengeful retreating troops had destroyed bridges and highways, but Towers was a liaison officer, and he knew the condition of the local roads and country lanes. He mapped a route to the installation in Hillersleben.

A tableau of misery confronted the lieutenant when he reached the train.

Clusters of skeletal men, women and children sprawled on the grass. Towers learned they had subsisted on starvation rations at Bergen-Belsen, and during their journey, they had received a single daily serving of watery potato or turnip soup and an occasional slice of moldy bread.

The Americans could spare only eight infantrymen and one tank crew to stay with the train during the 24 hours after its discovery. Hundreds of people remained in the boxcars, too sick or weak to exit. Some members of the transport had died of typhus. Soldiers were removing stricken occupants, as well as corpses, when Towers arrived. He watched medics cover the dead and sort the living according to physical condition.

Towers summoned jeeps and trucks from nearby army units.  He then led convoy after convoy over narrow, muddy back roads riddled with potholes. For two days, the sad caravans rumbled through farms, forests and villages to Hillersleben.

When the evacuation was complete, Towers moved on to other duties. The war in Europe ended soon after, on May 8, 1945. 

Decades later, history teacher Matthew Rozell undertook an oral history project in Hudson Falls, N.Y., that eventually connected Towers to survivors of the train transport. In 2001, Rozell interviewed former tank commander Carrol Walsh, one of the liberators of the train at Farsleben. Through the Internet, staff of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial discovered Rozell’s interviews, and they referred onetime prisoners from the transport to his website. The teacher soon began to hear from survivors around the globe. In 2007, he arranged a reunion for Walsh and three train passengers. When Towers read an Associated Press article about their gathering, he contacted Rozell. Then the two men embarked on a mission to locate other train survivors.

As president of the 30th Infantry Division Veterans of World War II Association, Towers invited the Holocaust survivors to share their wartime experiences at the soldiers’ reunions. In 2009, for example, Paul Arato, a survivor from Hungary, mesmerized his audience in Charleston, S.C. In a hushed, crowded room, Arato confided that he was publicly relating his harrowing memories for the first time. When he briefly lost his composure, several of his listeners wept with him. Arato insisted on finishing his account and has since repeated it for audiences in Canada, his adopted home.

During World War II, Towers did not know Arato’s background, or that of any of the liberated Jews he had helped.

“I couldn’t envision what they had gone through at Bergen-Belsen in the months and years they were there,” the former soldier told me in an interview.         

After learning their personal histories, Towers felt a growing rage at the lies of Holocaust deniers. He recognized a moral obligation to share his eyewitness Holocaust story whenever he could, particularly to young people.

“I hope it will make them vigilant to prevent it from happening again,” he said.  “It’s part of my Catholic upbringing that each of us should help our brothers in circumstances they can’t control themselves.”    

Already in his 90s, Towers spoke to college history classes in Florida and participated in two symposiums of liberators and train survivors organized by Rozell in Hudson Falls that were attended by more than 1,000 middle- and high-school students. Towers welcomed the chance to speak to hundreds of history students and teachers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and at the Learning Academy in Memphis, Tenn.

In 2011, curators of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial invited him to Germany, where they recorded his recollections.

That same year, Towers addressed almost 60 of the train passengers and 400 of their relatives in Rehovot, Israel. Some of his listeners had traveled from the United States, England, the Netherlands, Greece and Hungary to thank the 94-year old for his role in their rescue.  

Providentially, Frank Towers died on July 4, 2016 — Independence Day — and was buried from St. Madeleine Church in High Springs, Fla., on July 8. Until shortly before his death, he continued email correspondence about the train and its survivors.

May Frank rest in peace, and as his many Jewish friends say, “May his memory be a blessing.”

To learn more about the train at Farsleben, visit Matthew Rozell’s website: TeachingHistoryMatters.com.