Alan Moskin, World War II veteran who helped liberate Nazi concentration camp, dies at 96
Alan Moskin, a World War II infantry soldier who helped liberate a Nazi death camp and spent decades educating people on the Nazi Holocaust and his experiences, has died. The Nanuet attorney was 96.
Moskin entered the barbed-wired gates in Austria on May 4, 1945, at age 18 to witness bodies sprawled across the grounds and starving prisoners who had been tortured and confined to Gunskirchen, a subcamp of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp. Moskin served as a sergeant with Gen. George Patton's Third Army's 71st Division during World War II.
Moskin said in interviews that he saw men and women weighing as little as 60 pounds and piles of bodies.
Alan Moskin educates a generation
Moskin shared the memories with The Journal News, other media, and during educational seminars on the Holocaust over the years. He spoke about what he saw to thousands of people, including students, at seminars and events on the Holocaust. He became a fixture at the Rockland Holocaust Museum & Center for Tolerance and Education.
"I'd seen dead bodies when we fought the Nazis," Moskin said in one video on the Holocaust and liberation of camps. "I was not immune to death. But to enter a concentration camp and see skeletal-like bodies of the people so emaciated. It defies description. It's something you never forget.
"If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it," Moskin said. "It was so horrific. The stench is the first thing that hits you... The smell is an overpowering stench. The stench gets into your nostrils, into your brain."
Moskin offered generations a soldier's personal view of the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies across Europe from the 1930s to the end of World War II in Europe in 1945. His experiences - and those of other liberators - bore witness to the memories of murder, torture, and human degradation told by countless survivors.
His death on Saturday came during Yom HaShoah, amid internationally planned Holocaust remembrance memorial ceremonies, including those in the United States, Rockland, and Israel. He spoke at many Yom HaShoah remembrances.
"The death of our beloved Alan Moskin during Yom HaShoah was ‘bashert’ (meant to be)," said Paul Adler, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rockland Holocaust Museum and Center for Tolerance & Education.
"Alan was the epitome of that Greatest Generation of men and women of the World War II era that saved the world from Nazi tyranny," Adler said. "Alan’s service to his country and community continued with his passionate practice of law. Alan then became a community Holocaust educator teaching tens of thousands of students about his experiences as a soldier-liberator during WW II."
Moskin said in interviews that he locked away the memories of the death camp for 50 years, refusing to discuss what he witnessed. He said he suffered from "shell shock." When he returned from war, he said he would only tell people he "fought with (General George) Patton and did my job."
"I was scared if I talked about it, it would bring back those terrible nightmares," he said.
Rockland Holocaust Center came calling
Word got out among Rockland veterans about Moskin's experience as a liberator and reached the ears of officials at the Holocaust Center, then attached to Finkelstein Memorial Library in Spring Valley. The center is now at Rockland Community College.
He recalled his initial reaction to the Holocaust Center officials was to hang up the telephone.
But center officials persisted until he agreed to speak in 1995 at the community room in the Nanuet Mall. His talk became liberating and only his death stopped him from talking about the Holocaust and preaching against inhumanity and for people to stay vigilant.
He joined Holocaust survivors who make up the Rockland center's speaker's bureau. He spoke at local schools and community events to keep the memories of the Nazi genocide of six million Jews and five million other people alive and accurate.
"When I start speaking it was like a catharsis, a purging of all the poison," Moskin said in interviews. "It was good for me. Many survivors don't talk about it, even to their own family and children."
Adler recalled traveling to Poland with his adolescent children, Moskin, students, and survivors. They toured the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, located near the industrial city of Auschwitz. The Nazis murdered millions in the gas chambers of the extermination camp. People were brought by train cattle cars from labor camps across Europe.
Moskin captured the attention of the students with his commentary and war recollections.
"It was always about the survivors and their remembrance," Adler said. "Alan added the role of the liberator and the military entering the concentration camps. The kids just flocked to him."
The Rockland Holocaust Center issued the following statement:
"It is with a broken heart and deep sadness that The Holocaust Museum & Center for Tolerance and Education announces the passing of our HERO, Alan Moskin.
"Though Alan was nearing his 97th birthday in May, we are shocked and saddened by his death. Alan was a larger-than-life hero but also a close friend with whom we shared so many happy memories."
The center's statement also cited Moskin's "incredible service as an educator who spoke to thousands upon thousands of students across the globe in the course of his work to educate the world on the horrors of the Holocaust - with the aim of making sure it never happens again."
The center's statement concludes with: "May Alan's memory be for a blessing."
Steve Lieberman covers government, breaking news, courts, police, and investigations. Reach him at slieberm@lohud.com. Twitter: @lohudlegal.
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This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Alan Moskin, WWII vet who liberated Nazi concentration camp, dies at 96
