By Nick Buglione
At 83, Horowitz is truly a high school senior. Despite the enormous age gap between him and the 350 or so other students set to stroll down the aisle at East Meadow High School this Sunday, it took Horowitz just as much hard work and determination to earn his diploma.
His endeavors, however, were not in a classroom, but on a battlefield. When Horowitz finally gets to turn the tassel on his cap, making him an official member of the class of 2003, it will be in commemoration of his bravery during World War II -- the conflict that robbed him of his education and, worse, his innocence.
Born the son of immigrant Russian dairy farmers in the rural upstate town of Swan Lake, Horowitz was forced to drop out of high school because of the Great Depression.
Farming was not good in those days, and you just couldn't spend the money you didn't have, he said of the 386-acre, 110-cow farm his family owned. I had to leave school after my third year because things were pretty bad and my services were required.
Horowitz made the move reluctantly, never envisioning becoming a farmer himself in his adult years. I knew I wanted to do one thing: Get away from small-town life and see big-city lights, he said. I left school hoping that someday I would return.
But that day never came, and on Dec. 7, 1941, any dreams he had of going back to high school were squashed. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and three months later Horowitz was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was just 21.
As part of the newly formed Seventh Armored Division, Horowitz didn't set foot on foreign soil until June 15, 1944, when he and his comrades landed in Normandy. Nothing could have prepared him for what he would see in the ensuing months. Though he can't remember where he was or what the circumstances were the first time he saw action, he'll never forget his first taste of warfare.
I would say the largest majority of people in our division were apprehensive about what lay ahead, Horowitz said. You couldn't help but have butterflies. But ironically, within hours the adrenaline starts to flow and the butterflies start to disappear and we were ready.
Horowitz and his fellow soldiers ripped through northern Europe, bailing the British 2nd Army and the American 101st Airborne out of Holland and taking part in the Battle of the Bulge. They had three simple goals: to kill Germans, destroy their equipment and liberate towns. The Seventh Armored did all three particularly well. By war's end, the division captured some 113,000 prisoners of war and liberated 296 villages that had been annexed by Adolf Hitler's war machine.
The faces of the emancipated thousands have etched an indelible mark in Horowitz's memory. They came out of the houses, flags waving. They had tears of joy running down their cheeks, he said. There's nothing like losing your freedom and getting it back again. It's like you're reborn.
The citizens of those towns have never stopped showing their appreciation in the 60 years since, said Horowitz, producing a recent thank-you letter from the mayor of Reims, France, addressed personally to him, as proof.
The Seventh Armored, however, wasn't always met with waving flags and smiling faces. Coming upon a labor camp in Ohrdruf, Germany, just one day shy of Horowitz's 25th birthday, the soldiers caught their first glimpse of the Holocaust. When we liberated that camp, it was a horror, Horowitz said. We had no idea what we would encounter. We were young boys who had been turned into mature adults in less than a year; we were not prepared for this.
The worst was yet to come. Less than a week later, the troops stumbled into Bergen-Belsen, the concentration and prisoner-of-war camp where 70,000 lives were lost, including that of posthumously renowned diarist Anne Frank.
Horowitz can still recall the stench of death that hung in the air and the human remains that carpeted the ground. Emaciated and surviving on boiled potato skins, the survivors were an even more tragic sight to behold, he said. They were so frail that we were afraid to lift them because we thought their bodies would break," he said.
While Horowitz never received much formal education, he learned valuable lessons about survival and human behavior from the war.
By the time he was discharged, memories of his quiet, small-town life were a fog. Even though he would always long for his diploma, the thought of going back to high school after all he'd been through just seemed inappropriate.
Settling with his wife, Sally, in Queens, Horowitz started a business in Brooklyn and had two children. He and his wife moved to East Meadow about 30 years ago.
For the last year and a half, he's been a docent at the Nassau County Holocaust Museum and Educational Center in Glen Cove, sharing tangible wartime experiences with a generation far removed from the turmoil of World War II.
He is just phenomenal, said Regina White, the center's educational director. The way he presents is just incredible. No matter what group he speaks to, students or adults, they are spellbound.
Horowitz sees the irony in his success as an educator. When I was asked to be a docent at the Holocaust Museum, I didn't know what a docent was, he said. Here I am, teaching teachers, students and college kids, and I don't even have a high-school diploma. It just didn't seem right.
But that will all change this Sunday, when he becomes an honorary graduate of East Meadow High as part of Operation Recognition, a national program aimed at giving World War II veterans their diplomas.
It's guys like him that have given us the life we're used to, said Mark Scher, principal of the high school. We want to make it special for him.
By giving him a diploma, they already have, said Horowitz. It's one of the greatest things that can happen," he said. "It doesn't happen every day.
