The inmates were willing to eat anything, attests Katz, a native of a small Carpathian Mountain town in present-day Ukraine who had been working in Budapest when he was taken to a labor camp in 1943 and then transferred to Mauthausen. “There were some people who would cut flesh off of dead bodies just eat something,” he says. “There was no water. A couple more days, I would have been dead.”
An Army lieutenant who knew he was Jewish asked Moskin if he spoke any Hebrew or German, so that he could communicate with the prisoners.
“I remember saying the German for ‘I am also a Jew.’ It just came out of me. I don’t know where I heard it,” Moskin says. “An elderly man, very emaciated, started to smile and came towards me and he went down on his hands and knees and started to kiss my boots, which were tainted with blood, vomit, and feces. I knew he was trying to be affectionate toward me, but it made me very uncomfortable to watch him kissing my filthy, bloody boots. So I picked him up under the armpits, and as he came up towards me I could see open, festering sores going up and down his neck, and lice coming out of those sores. You could imagine that I wanted to pull away because he smelled so badly, but I didn’t. He had wrapped his arms around me and he was crying. He kept saying ‘Danke [thank you], danke, Jew.’ That’s when I lost it a little bit and started to cry.”
In the days that followed, word trickled in from other Army outfits that the events at Gunskirchen were just one liberation among many.
“Every time we found out,” Moskin recalls, “we said, ‘My God, how many of these damn hellholes are there?'”
Life After Liberation
After that day, Katz remained in the camp a bit longer, nursing his two brothers who had contracted typhoid fever, until they recovered enough to be taken to Budapest for treatment at an American hospital. He later made his way to the Soviet Union and resided there until 1973, when he immigrated to the U.S., where he worked as a silkscreen printer, raising his family in Philadelphia.
Moskin ended up staying in Europe until June 1946, as part of the U.S. Army of Occupation. An aspiring lawyer, he convinced an officer in charge to let him attend a day or two of the Nuremberg trials — an experience that only further cemented his career choice. But, despite working in the justice system, in the decades that followed he found it was too painful to talk about the injustice he had witnessed firsthand.
“I didn’t speak for 50 years about my experience,” he says, scared that nightmares of the dead horse would come back. “The kids say to me, ‘Oh, you had PTSD.’ We never heard that term. The only term we heard back then was ‘shell-shocked.’ I sucked it up. By the time I got home, I took a key and locked up that part of my brain, and I threw that key away. If anyone asked me about the war, I said, ‘I did my job, I was under [General] Patton and I don’t want to talk about it.'”
That changed in the 1990s when a woman at a local Holocaust museum, referred to him by one of his Army buddies, called to ask him to speak at an event. He hung up on her. She called back. After they spoke about the way Holocaust memory was evolving, from the 1993 publication of Deborah Lipstadt’s book on Holocaust denial to Illinois requiring school curricula to include the truth about the Holocaust, he agreed to tell what he had seen at an event on June 10, 1995, at the mall in Nanuet, N.Y.
He surprised himself by talking for a good two hours. It was the beginning of a second career as a Holocaust educator. “It was like a catharsis,” he says. “All that poison I had to bottle up inside me for 50 years, it just came out of me.”
Since then, he’s spoken to middle schools, high schools and colleges nationwide. “When we’re all gone, they [Holocaust deniers] are really going to come out of the woodwork,” he says. Katz says he was “overjoyed” to meet Moskin for the first time on Aug. 11, 2017, so they could corroborate their experiences. “I was happy that I met somebody who saw the conditions, so that my story wouldn’t be lost.”
Preserving that story, and its lesson, is a job that Moskin feels remains unfinished.
“I’m going to be honest with you, my generation failed,” he says. “We didn’t get rid of the hate and prejudice. There’s still hate out there, all over the place.”
But, as Katz sees it, that’s a job that will never be complete — which is why it’s important to remember that, even at the worst moments in human history, luck and goodness can run counter to evil.
“Even then, there were people that were good and kind,” he says. “Same thing now. There are some people that will always hate, and there are people that are good, and that’s just human nature.”