By Marley Seaman
Three or four times a week, Horowitz travels from his East Meadow home to speak to high school classes across Long Island. Teleconferencing allows him to reach across the country.
In a one-hour talk, Horowitz relates his experiences as part of Gen. George Patton¹s Seventh Armored Division. Horowitz¹s fellow soldiers liberated almost 300 towns in France and northern Europe, and they were the first to liberate one of the Nazi concentration camps and see the horrors of what happened inside.
His message, Horowitz says, is simple: ³Indifference kills.² That is also the motto of the Glen Cove-based Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, where he serves as a docent. He first approached the museum¹s directors four and a half years ago, hoping to donate a piece of memorial artwork he had been given by a French artist, Robert Abrami. They accepted the artwork, but Dr. Regina White, the center¹s educational director, wouldn¹t let Horowitz walk away.
³When he told me he¹d been a liberator, I told him, ŒWait a second, I need you!¹² she recalled.
Horowitz did not believe he was up to the task. ³ŒI don¹t think I can tell that story after 60 years,¹² he told museum officials. But they insisted that he try it just once, in front of a small group from Bay Shore High School.
³It didn¹t go easily,² he said. But when he finished, each of the 18 students hugged him. He knew then that he had found a new calling. And though he admits that his story never gets any easier to tell, even after hundreds of tellings, he is determined to share it.
³Students should not be bystanders, which is one of the things we try to teach them,² White said. ³They need to make sure they don¹t stand by while others are doing something [wrong].²
In conducting talks and raising funds for the center, Horowitz seems tireless. No wonder, then, that White said that inviting him on board was ³the best thing I ever did.²
³He travels from one end of this island to the other for us,² she said. ³He goes all around, and especially around Yom HaShoah [a Holocaust remembrance day that usually falls in late April], he¹ll be speaking every day and sometimes more than once a day.²
Horowitz does not make the war glorious. His talks are direct and starkly emotional. When he relates an incident in which he found two young French boys in a farmhouse, orphaned by the fighting, it is clear why the incident has remained fresh in his mind for more than 60 years. When he remembers the sight of tanks sinking into a thick peat moss bog ‹ on a day when 432 men died in less than 15 minutes ‹ his pain is evident.
After almost a year of fighting across Europe, a journey that included his participation in the Battle of the Bulge at the end of 1944, Horowitz recalled, ³We thought we were prepared for anything.² But in April 1945, the division liberated Camp Ohrdruf in Germany. At West Hempstead High School last month, Horowitz told a group of seniors what the soldiers saw in the camp.
³Bread and water rations had been canceled,² he recounted. ³[Prisoners were] living on boiled potato skins. Seventeen thousand had died in the month before we arrived.² The survivors were frightened and thin as skeletons. The soldiers did what they could, sharing their rations with those who were able to eat. A week later, when the division liberated the camp at Bergen-Belsen, they saw the same horrors on an even larger scale.
³Young boys, British and American, Jew and gentile, wept openly and unashamedly,² Horowitz said. When he spoke, he did the same.
He has returned to Europe often since World War II ended, and says he is always treated like a hero when he goes to France. The people there are deeply appreciative of the sacrifices American troops made, and European towns¹ various liberation days are enormous celebrations. But at home and abroad, Horowitz said, he feels that the passage of time is making people forget the realities of the war. At 60th anniversary D-Day celebrations two years ago, he realized that there would be almost no one alive for the 70th. Horowitz founded a group for veterans of his division that had 124 members at its peak. Now there are two. ³It becomes a lonely world after these years,² he said.
Horowitz is one of the few ³liberator docents² on Long Island. In addition to his talks at the center and his trips to schools, he has shared his remembrances with documentary filmmakers and authors. He wants to keep the memories alive.
Students¹ reaction to his talks does give him hope. Horowitz and his wife of 63 years, Sally, are both overwhelmed by the letters he receives from the schools. His presentation at West Hempstead High School came a few days before his 86th birthday, and after he finished, the students and teachers sang ³Happy Birthday.² Some of the students quickly scribbled birthday cards. Others bought them at stores and mailed them to him.
In 2003, more than six decades after his high school education was interrupted, Horowitz finally joined the ranks of graduates. East Meadow High School gave him an honorary diploma that year. It was a fitting reward for a man who has devoted so much of his energy to teaching others.
He will continue speaking until the school year ends, and in August he will address some 20,000 history teachers at a Hofstra University seminar. ³Then I¹ll rest until September,² he said ‹ when activity at the center will pick up again as teachers start bringing their classes. Until then, Horowitz will have a little more time to spend with Sally and their two children, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
