John L. Withers, 91, who died of cancer Oct. 7 at his Silver Spring, Md., home, never forgot the two emaciated Jewish boys in rags who trembled before him near Munich in 1945.
Withers, a newly commissioned Army lieutenant commanding an all-black supply convoy in postwar Germany, knew that regulations strictly forbade contact with refugees. Abiding by the rules was important for Withers, because he was counting on getting out of the service with an honorable discharge and using the GI Bill to attend graduate school.
But the two youths fell to their knees and begged him to let them stay with the troops. He looked at their sunken eyes and remembered delivering bread and milk to the newly liberated Dachau camp. He couldn’t bear the idea of sending anyone there, even if it was where ex-prisoners were recovering.
“They were sickly, thin, scared,” he said in 2004. “And they both had huge, beautiful eyes.” Let them stay, he told his men. “We’re going to take care of them.”
Withers never regretted that decision, although he lost touch with “Peewee” and “Salomon” when his military service ended. He often told the story to his sons, teaching them that regardless of the prejudice he experienced while growing up in the segregated South, he was not going to become consumed by prejudice in return.
Roy A. Rosenzweig, 57, a social and cultural historian at George Mason University who became a prominent advocate for “digital history,” a field combining historical scholarship with digital media, died Thursday at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington County. He had lung cancer.
Rosenzweig, who taught history at GMU for the past 26 years, founded the university’s Center for History and New Media in 1994. As its director, he oversaw the creation of online history projects aimed mostly at high-school and college students, including websites about U.S. history, the French Revolution and the history of science and technology.
Perhaps its most visible project was the Sept. 11 Digital Archive, a collection of 150,000 items – including e-mails, digital voice mails, BlackBerry communications and video clips – made by average citizens at the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks. The center gave the materials to the Library of Congress in 2003.
Rosenzweig was an author, filmmaker and documenter of oral histories. His books, including a social history of New York’s Central Park and the labor movement’s struggle in the 19th century for a shorter workday, underscored his interest in presenting what he called “perspectives of ordinary men and women” over the wealthy and powerful.
