THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MONDAY, MARCH 5, 2012
HISTORY
PAGE 7A
Fateful day years ago creates lifelong bond
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PHILADELPHIA — The way Ernie Gross and Don Greenbaum laugh and tell jokes with the ease of old friends, it's easy to assume the dapper octogenarians have known each other forever.
In reality, they only met a few months ago. Their familiarity doesn't come from shared memories of a childhood playground or a high school dance but a far darker place: Both men spent a single day at the Dachau concentration camp on the day its 30,000 prisoners were liberated by American Gls in 1945.
Greenbaum, 87, and Gross, 83, don't think they met that day in Dachau but nevertheless share a bond. They met after Gross, who lives in Philadelphia, saw a mention in a local newspaper last November about Greenbaum, a Philadelphia native now living in suburban Bala Cynwyd.
"Ernie wanted to thank me for saving his life, quote unquote, even though there were 50,000 other men there with me," Greenbaum said, with a hint of unease, during an interview at Gross' home. "And we sat and had lunch together and discussed what happened 66 years ago."
Gross, then all of 85 pounds after nearly a year of sickness, abuse and constant hunger, had no doubt April 29, 1945, was his last day on earth. Greenbaum, a soldier with Gen. George Patton's Third Army 283rd Field Artillery Battalion, arrived that day at Dachau expecting to seize ammunition, clothing and food that was kept for the Nazis notorious SS forces.
They were both wrong, it turned out.
The men, who talk about their experiences at local synagogues and schools, now are working together to find other Dachau survivors and liberators in the area to share their stories. They acknowledge that recounting the horrors of the Holocaust isn't easy but believe it's their duty.
"As we got near Dachau, about a mile outside the camp, there was an odor we couldn't identify." Greenbaum said. "When we arrived, I saw the boxcars. They were full of bodies."
History would come to call it the Dachau death train; some 40 cattle cars holding more than 2,000 men and women evacuated from another camp — and left to die on the train — in the final weeks of World War II.
"We had at that time never heard the expression 'concentration camp,' we never heard of a death camp," Greenbaum said. "None of us had any idea."
Gross, a Romanian Jew, was 15 when he and his family were taken from their home, deported to a ghetto in Hungary and eventually packed on a standing-room-only boxcar to Auschwitz in 1942. At the urging of a man next to him as they waited in line to be processed, he lied and told the SS officer he was 17.
Any younger and he'd be deemed incapable of hard labor and, he was told, immediately killed.
"The same guy who told me to lie said to me, 'Do you see that smoke in the sky where the sun cannot get through? This is going to be your parents in about two hours," he recalled. "My parents and younger brother and younger sister ... that's the last time I saw them." Of his older brothers also sent to labor camps, one — his favorite — also died.
"When you are bitter, it takes energy," he said. Constantly smiling and a consumate joke-teller, he says he tries to make one person laugh every day. Usually, he succeeds.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A World War II veteran, Don Greenbaum, and a Holocaust survivor, Ernie Gross, meet years after a fateful day in Dachau to forge a friendship. Gross and thousands of other prisoners were freed from the Dachau concentration camp by American forces which included Greenbaum.
LEGAL
Virginia Tech shooting case trial begins today
RICHMOND, Va. — The hours leading to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history and the actions of Virginia Tech administrators will be replayed in a Christiansburg courtroom when the parents of two students slain in the April 2007 massacre press their legal effort to hold school officials accountable.
During the trial that begins Monday, Attorney Robert Hall said he'll call Tech President Charles Steger and other top university officials to explain their actions the day 33 were killed on the Blacksburg campus, including the gunman. Hall said the parents want an
apology for what he calls the university's botched efforts after the two first killings occurred. He said he has new evidence that reveals further missteps.
"They want President Steger to say, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for the death of your daughters." Hall said.
The lawsuits originally sought $10 million for the wrongful deaths of Julia K. Pryde and Erin N. Peterson, but the damages are now capped at $100,000 for each of their parents. The state is the lone defendant in the case, which has been scaled back from the lawsuit originally filed two years after the deadly shootings on Tech's Blacksburg campus.
Among the other 20-plus witnesses Hall plans to call will be students who
survived the shooting rampage, the chief of Tech's police force and other university officials. The government is expected to call twice the number of witnesses during the trial that is likely to last a week.
Hall is expected to drill into the minutes between the slaying of two students in a dorm shortly after 7 a.m. on April 16 and the actions of university officials to alert the campus. An email informed the approximately 30,000 students on campus more than two hours later — after gunman Seung-Hui Cho had killed 30 in Norris Hall, a classroom building. He then killed himself.
Virginia Tech and Steger, among others, have been removed as defendants in the case.
COLLEGE ADMISSION
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Debra Shaver, dean of admissions, sits next to stacks of applications to the Smith College Class of 2016 from prospective students on Thursday, March 1. March is among the few colleges that invite parents to submit letters of recommendation.
Parents' opinions considered
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The letter recommending Christianne Beasley for admission to Smith College didn't come from the most unbiased of sources. But there was no disputing the writer knew this applicant as well as anyone.
"Christianne and Smith seem to be a perfect match," wrote Nancy Beasley, four years ago, on behalf of her only daughter, now a Smith senior. She described Christianne's "grace and dignity," and explained why she thought the prestigious and diverse Northampton, Mass., women's college was the perfect fit for the girl she'd raised.
Smith is among just a few colleges — among them nearby Mt. Holyoke and Holy Cross in Massachusetts, St. Anselm in New Hampshire, and the University of Richmond — that invite parents to submit letters on behalf of their children (either as part of the application itself, or in a follow-up invitation after the application is received). At Smith, finalizing this month the 640 or so members of the Class of 2016 from more than 4,300 applications, a little less than half include a parental letter. The college takes pains to emphasize such letters are optional and won't make or break a decision.
What do parents tell colleges about their flesh and blood? Rarely anything bad, to be sure (though sadly, it does happen). A fair share burst with predictably over-the-top pride in their children's virtues, which are dated back to infancy, and in some cases, utero (a few years ago, Smith decided to impose a single-page limit).
But there's a reason Smith has stuck with the process for about 20 years now, despite the extra work, says Smith's director of admission, Deb Shaver. Sometimes parents offer just the kind of color that can bring to life a candidate whose full personality is hidden in a portrait painted only with grades, test scores and traditional recommendations letters from teachers and guidance counselors.
against (admittedly epidemic) helicopter parenting, the pendulum might have swung a little too far.
"You might think they do nothing but brag," Shaver said. "But parents really nail their kids. They really get to the essence of what their daughter is about in a way we can't get anywhere else."
After all, it's parents who may have the best view of what's really great about their children.
"We get to this point and say, 'You can't be driving the bus, you need to be in the backseat,' Shaver said. "It's all true, and yet I think parents can provide texture to those applications that can't be found anywhere else.
It's also an acknowledgment that in the backlash in admissions
"Who knows a kid better than their mother and father?" she asked.
For Christianne Beasley, a letter from Mom was the perfect closing argument to her case that Smith was the place for her.
"Sometimes there's that bad connotation of the overbearing parents who feel the need to control their kids' decision," she said. "In my case, it was the opposite. It was to make sure I had the best application possible and Smith saw the best part of me."
For her mom, it was a chance to participate, but also share something she knew nobody else would have seen; the way her daughter lit up when she first visited Smith's campus.
"You know how they say when you see your wedding dress or your house, you just knew it's the one? She just knew it was the 'one,' said Nancy Beasley, of Westbrook, Maine. "Nobody else would have known."
David Hawkins, director of public policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said there are reasons why very few colleges solicit parental letters. One is sheer logistical burden; most colleges don't have the staff to do more than execute a fairly straight forward admissions formula of grades and test scores. It's no accident that the practice is found only at small liberal arts colleges which take special pride in getting to know their students.
And colleges are mainly concerned with evaluating candidates academically. For that, a parental letter offers little credible guidance.
income applicants from applying, particularly those from non-English speaking families, or places such students at a disadvantage if they disproportionately decline to do so.
But perhaps the biggest worry, which Hawkins shares, is "advancing the advantaged," to use the catch phrase in admissions. The question is whether the practice discourages lower-
"Asking the parents to contribute an essay to their children's application may be a barrier for some populations," he said.
Shaver doesn't have data, but says she's confident Smith's parental letters spread a broad range (Smith, in fact, has a strong record attracting low-income students; 22 percent receive Pell Grants, meaning they come from low-income families. That's a higher proportion than at virtually any other highly selective college).
Often, it's lower-income families who make the most meaningful efforts to participate in the process. One mother submitted a video; her daughter translated. One father drove several hours to campus and walked into the admissions office without an appointment, demanding to see Shaver.
"He said, 'I don't know English very well and you asked for this recommendation, so I'm going to talk it to you,' she recalled.
Nanci Tessier, who worked in Smith's admissions office in the mid-1990s just after it started the practice, has been a kind of missionary for parental letters, taking the practice with her first to St. Anselm and later to the University of Richmond, a school of about 3,000 undergraduates where she's vice president of enrollment management.
Parental letters are often the best window into a student's soul, she said. She recalled one letter recounting an applicant's response to the death of her father in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Nowhere else in the application had that come up.
Most stories and letters are less dramatic. But sometimes even mundane ones can offer something to help a sympathetic admissions officer make a case before the committee.
Who exactly are such letters for? It's hard to say.