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A Soldier Witnesses: “I’ll Be in a Better Frame of Mind Tomorrow…”

April 17, 2026 by Matthew Rozell

“I’ll Be in a Better Frame of Mind Tomorrow.”

April 17, 2026

Eighty-one years ago today, a young man sat down somewhere in central Germany and wrote a letter to his minister back home in Dayton, Ohio.

He had not written in months. He apologized for that. And then he described something that had happened four days earlier — something so shattering that he could not bring himself to write his mother about it, not yet, not that night.

“Today I saw a sight that’s impossible to describe, however I’ll try.”

He tried. And the letter that emerged from First Lieutenant Charles M. “Chuck” Kincaid — spare, honest, written in the plain language of a young man still working out what he had just witnessed — has become one of the most remarkable documents in the entire archive of the Train Near Magdeburg story. I want to share it again today, on its 81st anniversary. But this time, thanks to Chuck’s daughter Judi and her husband Mark, I can finally introduce you more fully to the man behind it. And what a man he was.

Chuck was born on June 20, 1918, in Dayton, Ohio. His father ran a garage and body shop, and as a boy Chuck made himself useful hanging around the mechanics, handing out wrenches, learning how things worked. When Chuck was about ten, his father expanded and took on the Essex car dealership to challenge Ford and Chevy. Three years later, the Great Depression arrived and the business went bankrupt.

And then — though Chuck would never speak of it, not once, not to his own children — something harder than the Depression happened that effected the whole family. His father left. And so Chuck, at twelve years old, became the man of the family.

Somehow his mother kept the house. She turned one of the bedrooms into a rental, taking in two college students from the University of Dayton at ten dollars a week — she made their breakfast and did their laundry. And Chuck, by age ten, had already gotten himself a paper route. By the time he was in junior high he had a morning route and an evening route. He tells it matter-of-factly in the brief autobiography he wrote in 1986: “I can remember at one point, around 1933, that the $3 to $4 that I earned weekly put food on the table.”

He graduated from high school in 1936, in the upper ten percent of his class, and got a job at National Cash Register for ten dollars a week. When that slumped, he found work at Standard Register, and saved over four hundred dollars in two years — which he describes, with characteristic understatement, as “no mean trick those days.” He enrolled at the University of Cincinnati in the fall of 1938 in an engineering co-op program. He worked jobs in between semesters to pay for the next — at a factory, at a restaurant, at a plating control plant making 35 cents an hour. When the co-op program fell apart as the country converted to wartime production and U of C raised tuition to $650 a year, he transferred to Ohio State, where the tuition was twenty dollars a quarter. He took ROTC because it paid twenty dollars a month and supplied a uniform — and he needed the uniform.

He entered the Army from OSU at the age of twenty-five. He was an older soldier. He had earned everything the hard way, one semester at a time, since the age of twelve.

By April 1945, Chuck had fought from Normandy across Europe with the 30th Infantry Division. He was no stranger to danger — he had earned an Air Medal at the Battle of Mortain the previous August by doing something extraordinary: climbing into a small Piper L-4 observation plane and flying it over four attacking Panzer divisions to call in artillery adjustments. He earned a Bronze Star at St. Lô. He was, by any measure, a brave and capable young officer. And he had seen things no human being should have to see:

On April 17, 1945, Chuck Kincaid came upon the train.

That evening, he wrote to his minister:

Not one of them, Chuck wrote, could walk a mile and survive. The army improvised what it could: watered-down C-rations served as soup, force used to keep people in line because they had, as Chuck put it, “no will power left, only the characteristics of beasts.” He believed that a few weeks of decent food would restore them to something resembling human dignity. He was right. But he also understood, with a clarity that comes through even in his plain soldier’s prose, that the scars on their minds would last the rest of their lives.

Chuck wrote: “No other single thing had convinced me as this experience has that Germany isn’t fit to survive as a nation. I’ll never forget today.”

He meant it. He had earned the right to mean it. But history, which rarely moves in straight lines, had something else in mind — something Chuck Kincaid could not possibly have foreseen from that ravine in April 1945. Today, it is young Germans, three kilometers from where he stood, who have become among the most devoted keepers of this memory. Johanna Mücke, who first wrote to me as a sixteen-year-old in 2018, went on to correspond with combat medic Walter Gantz in the last year of his life, and on the 75th anniversary of the liberation — alone, during a pandemic that had cancelled the planned ceremony — walked to the site at Farsleben and placed flowers on the bare concrete foundation of the unfinished monument. Her teacher, Karin Petersen, and community members like Daniel Keweloh have continued to build and sustain that memorial presence, ensuring that what Chuck witnessed is permanently marked in the landscape where it happened. What fanaticism and fascism had done to ordinary human beings — the devastation Chuck could barely find words for — these young people have chosen to carry forward not as shame to be hidden, but as a responsibility to be honored. Chuck couldn’t have imagined it. I find, whenever I think about it, that I am still moved by it.

And then, with a gentleness that reveals everything about who he was:

“I was going to write Mother tonight but thought better of it. I’ll be in a better frame of mind tomorrow.”

He protected her. After everything she had given — keeping the house, taking in the boarders, feeding her children through the Depression while her husband was gone — he didn’t want to add to her burden. He’d write something better for her when he could find the words for that, too.

I never met Chuck Kincaid. He had passed before I found his letter, which came to me in March of 2009, brought by his son-in-law Mark, who had connected that old family document — transcribed by Chuck’s sister Helen and passed around in copies — to the photographs of the liberation on our school website. I have since had the privilege of meeting Judi and Mark, and learning more about the man her father became after the war. He went to work for the American Can Company and spent thirty-five years there, much of that time with Anheuser-Busch improving the beer can and its handling equipment. His name is on the patent for the aluminum pop-top can that most of us have been opening our entire lives without ever thinking about who made it possible. He was, as Judi says simply, “a very brilliant man.” But also a man who had been the man of his family since age twelve, who worked his way through college a semester at a time, who flew over four Panzer divisions in a tiny observation plane, who stood beside a train in a German ravine and watered down C-rations for people who had been reduced to something barely alive, and who wrote to his minister about it because he didn’t want to upset his mother.

That is who these men were. That is the America that showed up at Farsleben on April 13, 1945.

Since I first shared Chuck’s letter on this blog, the story has continued to unfold in ways I could not have imagined. The young people of Wolmirstedt, Germany — a half-hour walk from where Chuck stood that April morning — have taken up this history with a commitment that moves me deeply every time I think of it, and the tenacious Ron Chaulet working from the Netherlands, alongside so many dedicated community members, have continued to build and sustain the memorial presence at the liberation site — ensuring that what Chuck Kincaid witnessed is permanently marked in the landscape where it happened.

And then there is the film footage.

In July 2023, US Army Signal Corps footage of the train at Farsleben — filmed on April 14, 1945, just around the time Chuck’s letter was written — surfaced from the National Archives after 78 years. A German museum associate in Wolmirstedt noticed just a few seconds of it in a documentary and wondered to me if it was our train. Our film team made the inquiry to the National Archives and within weeks the full reel arrived. James Bulgin, head of public history at the Imperial War Museum in London, told us that when he first saw it he stared in silence and played it over and over. He had known this story for years through photographs — but the film restored what photographs can never quite give: motion, life, the physical reality of those people in that ravine on that April morning. Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, who helped build the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has described the arrival of the American soldiers as occurring at “11:59 and 59 seconds” in the lives of the prisoners. The film shows you what that means.

And in it, you can see the words chalked on the side of car number 16: THREE CHEERS FOR AMERICA. VIVE LES U.S.A.

Someone on that train wrote those words. Someone found a piece of chalk in the hours after liberation — and soon after Chuck was composing his thoughts to his minister — and scratched their gratitude onto the side of the shabby train car that had carried them to the edge of death. They had no idea anyone would see it 78 years later. Neither did Chuck, when he put pen to paper.

The letters we write, not knowing who will one day find them. The words chalked on a train car, not knowing they will be seen by the world. The boy who became the man of the family at twelve, who flew over Panzer divisions at twenty-five, who could not find adequate words for his mother but managed to find them for his minister — all of it now part of a story that refuses to end.

I am so grateful to Judi and Mark for trusting us with Chuck’s autobiography, and with the parts of his story that he himself, with characteristic modesty, left out.

soldier chuck kincaid in the netherlands with two Dutch children, likely 1944

He said he’d be in a better frame of mind tomorrow.

I think he was. I think he always was.

— Matthew Rozell, April 17, 2026

The full text of Chuck Kincaid’s letter is posted here. The US Army Signal Corps footage of the train liberation, recovered from the National Archives in July 2023, is viewable at my YouTube channel. The film A Train Near Magdeburg is in production and coming in 2027. To learn more about the progress of the film, visit MagdeburgTrain.com and to support, the Augusta Chiwy Foundation.

a letter from a soldier describing what he saw at the train. 4.17.45

April 17, 1945

Dear Chaplain;-

Haven’t written you in many months now, its funny how a few moments are so hard to find in which to write a letter way past due; it’s much easier to keep putting it off the way I’ve done. I’ll try to make up for it in this letter.

Today I saw a sight that’s impossible to describe, however I’ll try. Between 2400 and 3000 German refugees were overran by my division during our last operation; most of them were, or had been, inmates of concentration camps, their crimes the usual ones, – Jewish parentage, political differences with der Fuhrer, lack of sympathy for the SS, or just plain bad luck. Not one of these hundreds could walk one mile and survive; they had been packed on a train whose normal capacity was perhaps four or five hundred, and had been left there days without food.

Our division military government unit took charge of them, and immediately saw what a huge job it was going to be, so they sent out a call for help. Several of our officers went out to help them organize the camp they were setting up for them. The situation was extremely ticklish we soon learned; no one could smoke as it started a riot when the refugees saw the cigarette, and we couldn’t give the kiddies anything or they would have been trampled to death in the rush that would result when anything resembling food was displayed. The only nourishment they were capable of eating was soup; now the army doesn’t issue any of the Heinz’s 57 varieties, so we watered down C-ration[s] and it served quite well.  It was necessary to use force to make the people stay in line in order to serve them. They had no will power left, only the characteristics of beasts.

A few weeks of decent food will change them into a semblance of normal human beings; with God willing the plague of disease that was already underway, will be diverted; but I’m wondering what the affect of their ordeal they have been through, will be on their minds; most will carry scars for the rest of their days for the beatings that they were given. No other single thing had convinced me as this experience has that Germany isn’t fit to survive as a nation. I’ll never forget today.

I was going to write mother tonight but thought better of it. I’ll be in a better frame of mind tomorrow. I’m only a few dozen miles from Berlin right now, and its hard to realize the end is in sight. I’m always glad to receive your scandal sheet. You perhaps missed your calling, as your editorial abilities are quite plain.

As ever,

Charles.

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The Ripples Go Forth: A Message Across Eighty Years

March 30, 2026 by Matthew Rozell

TeachingHistoryMatters.com  ·  Matthew Rozell  ·  Remembering Those Who Came Before

World War II  ·  351st Bomb Group  ·  B-17  ·  July 29, 1944

The Ripples Go Forth: A Message Across Eighty Years

By Matthew Rozell

March 30, 2026

It started, as so many things do now, with a Facebook message out of the blue. A stranger’s name in my inbox, but then a few lines that stopped me cold.

Her name was Eileen Kaynan. She had been searching for her uncle online — the way people do today, typing a name into a search bar, half-expecting nothing — when the internet handed her something extraordinary. A photograph.

The same photograph that had hung in her grandmother’s living room for as long as she could remember. Ten young men in front of a B-17 Flying Fortress. And there, labeled now in someone else’s handwriting, was her uncle: Sgt. Guido Signoretti.

I just recently bought the book The Things Our Fathers Saw, Vol. 2. I became aware of it when I did a Google Search of my Uncle's name. He was one of the aircrew that Clarence McGuire and John Swarts were part of. His name was Guido Signoretti. Imagine my surprise to see the same photo of the aircrew that hung in my Grandmother's living room all the while I was growing up.
My Mother — Guido's sister — is 91 and I shared the information with her. We had been contacted by the Army a few years ago to provide DNA to aid in their search to identify remains.
His story is one of the reasons I served in the United States Navy. We should never forget them.
— Eileen Kaynan, March 19, 2026

Read that again. Ninety-one years old. The Army, still searching, still trying to identify remains. And a niece who joined the Navy — many decades later — partly because of a young man she never met, whose photograph watched over the family home like a quiet vigil.

I had to sit with that for a while.

The Photo That Haunted Two Houses

When I wrote the introduction to The Things Our Fathers Saw, Volume II, I described the crew photo that had followed me through childhood. It hung somewhere in the background of memory — ten men, young, smiling, someone’s hand having placed a small cross over the head of one of them, Clarence McGuire, my father’s cousin. Dead at twenty, on his sixth mission over Germany, July 29, 1944. Clarence’s grieving mother probably drew that cross, in our household picture, that I stared at in wonderment as a young boy and teen. Just look at the smile on him, the tallest one in the back row.

What I never knew — what I couldn’t have known — was that the very same photograph was hanging in another home, in New Jersey, watched over by another grieving mother. Guido Signoretti’s mother. Standing near in the back row to Clarence in that picture. Friends, it turns out. Close ones. And look at the smile on him!

Two families. Two homes. One photograph, reproduced and carried and kept. And for more than eight decades, no connection between them.

Until Eileen typed her uncle’s name into a search bar.

Who Was Guido Signoretti?

Born December 18, 1921, in Leonia, New Jersey. The family later moved to Dumont, NJ, around 1939. His sister — Eileen’s mother, now 91 — was born when their mother was 40 years old, meaning she was only about nine years old when Guido was killed. She has outlived all of her siblings. She is the last one left who remembers him from those years.

Eileen told me she has digitized letters Guido sent home during his training stateside, before he shipped out to England. Letters from a young man who didn’t yet know what was coming. Letters that a family kept, carefully, for eighty years.

The Army contacted the family in recent years requesting DNA — still working, still trying to bring people home.

John Swarts Remembered Him, Too

When I finally tracked down John Swarts — the original tail gunner, the one who survived because flak had burned his eyelid two days before and put him in the hospital — he sent me photographs and scrapbook pages. Among them was a picture of five young men, standing together, candid, playful. Cousin Clarence in the white tee, left arm around his pal, Maurice, the Jewish kid from Port Jervis, N.Y. (Clarence hailing from the Bronx, the only two New Yorkers on the crew).

Left to right: Clarence McGuire. Maurice Franzblau. Guido Signoretti. Fenton Strohmeyer. John Swarts.

Guido is there, right in the middle of John’s best friends. He is in the photo that opens the book. He is named, placed, remembered — by a man who by then had lived ninety-three years and still called July 29, 1944 the worst day of his life. And John is in the background. He is giving a wan smile in the photograph, almost conveying a sense of sadness to me. That’s his handwriting in the caption, this photograph being one that would haunt him the rest of his days.

When Eileen’s message arrived and I told her about John’s photograph, the caption, the handwriting — My Best 4 Friends of our crew all killed in action But me — she had no idea until she opened the first page of my book. She had never seen that image in her life, and neither had his little sister. A photo of her uncle, captioned by a grieving friend, sitting in a scrapbook in Missouri, now Florida, for eighty years. She was seeing it for the first time.

Does It Bring Closure?

I’ve been turning this question over since her message arrived.

I don’t think history works that way — not cleanly, not finally. Eileen’s 91-year-old mother studied the labeled crew photograph “pretty hard,” Eileen told me. She was nine years old when her brother died. She has spent a lifetime with a fragment of that story, knowing only what a child could piece together from siblings and letters and a photograph on a wall.

To learn, now, that her brother was one of John Swarts’ best friends, that he stood in the middle of a picture captioned with grief and love, that a historian’s cousin and her brother were crewmates, perhaps friends, killed on the same mission on the same plane — that the photograph that watched over one family’s living room was the same one that haunted another family’s memory — I don’t know that “closure” is the right word for what that does.

Maybe it’s more like “”recognition”. The feeling that someone’s life, however brief, left marks that lasted. That the people who loved him were not alone in remembering, that across eight decades and two family lines who never knew each other — that the weight of that July morning in 1944 was being carried by more people than anyone realized.

✦   ✦   ✦

I wrote in the epilogue to that book: The ripples go forth. But they also come back. I meant it about John Swarts calling me out of the blue in 2017. About my students leaving memorial pebbles at a grave, about the way history, if you let it, keeps moving through time and finding new people to touch.

I didn’t know then that the ripples were still traveling. That a woman in New Jersey would type her uncle’s name into a search bar seventy-three years after the plane came down, and find her way to a book, and find her way to me, and that I would find my way back to her — and that together we would find Guido Signoretti standing in the middle of a photograph, surrounded by friends, remembered.

Eileen wrote to me: We should never forget them.

She is right. And the extraordinary thing — the thing that still moves me, sitting here at this keyboard — is that forgetting has proven harder than anyone might have feared. These men keep finding ways to be remembered. Through books. Through search engines. Through families that kept photographs on walls. Through a daughter who joined the Navy because of an uncle she never met.

“I get a little emotional. I’m almost 93;
I hope to see them all again in heaven.”
— John S. Swarts, tail gunner, B-17 “Pugnacious Ball”

John Stanley Lee Swarts, passed away at the age of 97, March 27, 2022, at his home in Summerfield, Florida. (Is it a coincidence that I wrote this remembrance on the anniversary of the weekend of his passing? I think not.) The last of the crew, plagued with guilt for years, standing on the tarmac July 29, 1944, waiting for his plane and his friends to return. But the ripples return. The wonders don’t stop. They just keep going.The story is not finished.

Eileen Kaynan has generously offered to share letters and photographs of her uncle Guido Signoretti, which I hope to present here in a future post. If you have any connection to the 351st Bomb Group, 511th Squadron, or to any of the crew of B-17 #4238146, please reach out. I have tagged them all by name in this post.

© 2026 TeachingHistoryMatters.com · Matthew Rozell · All Rights Reserved

Author of The Things Our Fathers Saw series ·

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A Day of Commemoration and Thanksgiving.

February 5, 2026 by Matthew Rozell

On February 1st 2026, I was at a special invitation-only gathering outside of New York City, a reunion of a family that was saved on the train 81 years ago this coming April.

The director of our upcoming film, Mike Edwards, and cameraman/photographer Josh F. was there with me and my wife, along with a daughter, Elizabeth, of liberator Red Walsh, the tank commander I interviewed in 2001 that started this whole odyssey of discovery and reunification. In attendance was also a daughter, Darlene, of medic Walter Gantz.

We had arrived the night before the Sunday afternoon event. I slept poorly, with fitful periods of sudden waking that left me exhausted, and the brutality of the February cold and wind had really worn me down; I don’t think it was nerves, but on some restless, anticipatory level I felt like I was a part of an event that was bringing together a family that I really did not even know, but was somehow connected to.

I didn’t know what to expect, but we walked into a welcome that was warm and joyous. Mike was there to allow this family gathering, many of whom had never met one another, and most who had never heard of this liberation event, the opportunity to preview a working draft of the film, A Train Near Magdeburg.

Upon arrival, my wife sat at a table with a grandmother who had been a little girl on the train. So many young women came up to her; Laura was taken with how much respect was devoted to her and the elders. Respecting the family’s wishes, we are not publishing their names, but no less than 13 members of this family were eventually liberated on this train, and the ordeals they suffered in the years and months leading up to their imprisonment in Bergen Belsen are a microcosm of the story of the catastrophe suffered by the Jews of Hungary.

As the film began, I sat in the front row on the women’s side of that gathering, with my wife and the liberators’ daughters. I scanned the audience going back twenty or so rows. They were riveted to the screen. Later, they crowded to the front, the young with cameras poised, all wearing smiles of gratitude, expressions of joy and astonishment, some even appearing dazed and starstruck, for lack of a better term. So many asked, “How did you find us?”, when the answer was, really, “No, your family had found me!” Which is true, some members had found us through my website and blogposts in the later part of the past twenty-five years.

So many miracles. No coincidences. Three hundred and twelve people from this one family had registered for the event, and I was repeatedly told that that was only one-quarter of this one family that had been saved on this train. And so many of the young people I encountered today were not even born when Red Walsh told me his story of coming across the train with fellow tank commander George Gross— “get in touch with Gross, he had a camera and took pictures that day…” which I dutifully did, posted on our school website, and four years later, began to hear from the first survivors of the train… I mean, what led me down this path, which has now been a third of my life? The only answer I have is the cosmic force, which I tried to explore in another post.

Family members asked about the book. They just did not really know this story, for the most part, outside of captivity in Bergen Belsen, transport for six days, the train shuttling back and forth, then stopping, and then liberation at the hands of the American army at the eleventh hour… That’s it.

I explained that I wrote it as my own teacher’s journey into the Holocaust, but more importantly, as an exploration of what really happened to these families in the context of the greatest crime in the history of the world.

I wrote it for the soldiers, who had no idea of what it was that they had stumbled across, what would also inflict decades of recurring traumas, until at last I was able to put them in touch with those they saved, and I wrote about that, eleven reunions on three continents. I wish the soldiers were with us in person Sunday to see the results, but they were there with us all, nonetheless.

There was profound appreciation for the soldiers’ side of the story from the survivors’ multiple generations. My wife spoke to a family who had driven all the way down from Toronto, Canada, and as the second part of the film began, Laura reminded me that it was the anniversary of George Gross’s passing. That’s right! It was fifteen years ago that day! A time for reflection, the liberator’s Yahrzeit.

It was also our son’s 28th birthday; and the event reminded me a bit of the thanksgiving event set up by my friend (and survivors’ daughter) Varda in Israel 15 years ago this year, where my son dutifully took pictures for me as a newly minted thirteen-year-old to celebrate the arrival of liberator Frank Towers on Israeli soil. Fifty-five survivors were in attendance that day!

Frank Towers at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot israel, 2011. Photo by Ned Rozell.

Menorahs were presented to the families of the liberators, in gratitude.

Laura and I said our goodbyes and drove home in the cold, but also the enveloping warmth of the day’s events, with clear skies, a dry road, and a rising full moon to light the way. I think a new flame was lit today into many of these hearts; I hope that our film will also illuminate the hope that our soldiers represented to these oppressed people to others and lead them to live with a better understanding of what we can all do to make the world a better place.

We all are called to answer the question poised by a survivor of the so-called “lost transport”, the third train from Belsen, in his creation of a Day of Judgment scenario, where the souls of the murdered children of the Holocaust sit and inquire of us all:

“What have you done during your sojourn on earth?”

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Nuremberg, 80 Years on.

November 23, 2025 by Matthew Rozell

During the first Nuremberg Trial, American guards maintain constant surveillance over the major Nazi war criminals in the prison attached to the Palace of Justice. Nuremberg, Germany, November 1945. NARA, public domain, via USHMM. I interviewed the third guard on the left side.

My wife and I went to see the 2025 film Nuremberg yesterday, starring, among others, Russell Crowe as Hermann Goering and Rami Malek as the psychiatrist assigned to him. Overall, while unfamiliar with the story of Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley, I felt the film was generally well done from the aspect of a Holocaust and World War II educator. I felt that, for the most part, the portrayal of chief prosecutor was well done, particularly from the angle of setting precedent for holding war criminals accountable for their individual actions. This was the first time in the history of the world that this had been attempted; leaders of a nation—military commanders, government officials, and propagandists—were held personally responsible for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, destroying the defense of “I was only following orders.” It created the legal foundation for modern human rights.

The International Military Tribunals debuted in Nuremberg for a reason, which was well brought out in the film. It was the central rallying point for the massive Nazi displays of power in the early days of the Reich—see Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934-35 classic documentary, Triumph of the Will, which I would show to my seniors despite its almost two hour run time— and the sinister 1935 Nuremberg Laws that defined ‘Jewishness’ and codified antisemitism, beginning with stripping German Jews of their civil rights.

What a lot of folks who may be familiar with the Nuremberg trial portrayed here may not actually be aware of is that it was only the first of several trials. Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson set the tone early on.

Documenting the truth of Nazi crimes was the signature achievement. The trials produced an enormous body of evidence—captured documents, films, photographs, eyewitness testimony, and first-hand accounts from perpetrators. The authentic films of the camps upon liberation were included in this movie, and while hard to watch, just like in 1945-46, it showcased that the Holocaust one of the most documented crimes in world history, countering future denial with overwhelming proof.

The trials also set a moral example after a global catastrophe. Rather than executing Nazi leaders summarily—as some Allied leaders wanted—the Allies insisted on a lawful trial. This demonstrated that justice would not be simply vengeance, that the rule of law was stronger than dictatorship, and even the worst crimes deserved legal scrutiny.

To be sure, Hollywood took some liberties. The scenes portraying Jackson as being outwitted by Goering on the stand, and in which the psychiatrist Kelley hands over confidential notes to a gorgeous reporter in an intoxicated state were outright fabrications, to be sure. Others have criticized it for showing the humanity of the chief perpetrators, but I do not have much of a problem with that. For if we hold that they were all monsters, we are just letting humanity off the hook for the next time, as I have written about before, and while I speak for myself, many professionals in Holocaust education circles are in agreement.

But let’s not forget about the everyday GIs who found themselves at Nuremburg. In Volume 7, Across the Rhine, I introduce at least two of the guards to you, in their own words.

The Courtroom Sentinel

Leo DiPalma was the son of Italian immigrants who grew up in the western part of Massachusetts in the Great Depression. Like many young high schoolers at the time, he was shocked at the news of Pearl Harbor, and ready to serve when his number was called three years later at the age of eighteen. He gained combat experience as an infantryman with the 79th Division, crossing the Rhine in 1945 before being tasked with a new assignment in the 1st Division—standing guard, at the tender age of nineteen, over some of the most notorious war criminals of the 20th century.

I pulled guard duty in the cell block [at Nuremberg]. The cell block was sort of a center, like a star, and all these blocks went off this way [gestures several radial corridors with hand]. Well one of these blocks had the 21 bigwigs, Hermann Goering and Ribbentrop and Hess and all those guys. I was a staff sergeant at the time. I pulled guard on Albert Speer’s cell, and Rudolf Hess. Then after that I was there for a short while, I became sergeant of the guard. I took my regular duties every other day for 24 hours. Luckily, I was asked to go up into the courtroom. I pulled guard with the courtroom guard at one of the visitor doors. After that, I was asked to go up onto the witness stand. That was very interesting, because from where we stood, we weren’t too far from the interpreters. If they were speaking German, and you could pick out [the English translations], you know, so you could know what’s going on, that was very, very interesting. I actually had, at that time, the latter part of the 21 original prisoners, like von Schirach, and Raeder, and Donitz, and Sauckel, right around that area there. I was moving up real fast. I stayed there until July of ’46.

‘Goering and I, We Didn’t get Along’

I had a lot of contact [with these prisoners]. Goering, he was the highest-ranking German soldier there. He expected to be treated like he was a high-ranking officer. The rest of them, believe it or not, they used to bow down to him, let him go first and stuff like that. He and I didn’t get along when I took over sergeant of the guard.

One of my duties was, during a recess, when I opened the door, I stood at parade rest right in the docket where he was right in the corner. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of it. He would turn to me, and he asked me for some water. ‘Vasser, bitte.’ Okay. I go down to the Lyster bag, which was chlorinated, and I’d get him a little cup of water, and I’d bring it up to him. And he’d take a sip and he’d go, ‘Bah, Americanich.’ You know? He’d hand it back to me. Now there was no way of getting rid of the water; I used to have to walk down to the men’s room on this side to get rid of the water and walk back up.

Mr. DiPalma later recalled that fed up with Goering’s antics, he once met Goering’s demands by replacing the contents of the cup with water from the toilet instead of the tap, which Goering found better than the chlorinated version. ‘I guess I felt it was my little contribution to the war effort,’ he added.

In the meantime, you know, I think he was just doing it on purpose, just getting rid of me. I think one of the things was that he didn’t want to do any talking, didn’t know if maybe I spoke German or stuff like that. I could understand a little bit. But what he didn’t know is, we had some German-speaking GIs right there, and they picked up some stuff on him anyway.

Another time, at night when court was over, one of my duties as the sergeant of the guard was to run the elevator. The elevator was located behind a docket in one of the panels. The elevator carried six people: three prisoners, two guards, and myself, made it [one guard to one prisoner], going up or going down. Well at night, we had to get out of there and run and get our trucks to get back to our billet. Everybody would step back, and there’s big confusion in the docket. [The Germans] let [Goering] go right through, you know. Well, one night, I grabbed ahold of Field Marshal Keitel, he was standing right there. I said, ‘Come on, get in, get in.’ And I dragged him in like that. He was indignant; he was going to let Goering get [in first]. I pulled somebody else in, and somebody else, and I left him, left Goering standing there, you know. I think that was one of the reasons why he would send me for water every day, he was getting back at me.

Another time everybody in the docket was stepping over one another, letting him get out first; they were going to lunch. He didn’t want to cross the hallway where spectators were, he wanted to walk right across—he didn’t want anybody to look at him. So this Captain Gilbert told us, ‘Put him last.’ Okay, so we put him last. Don’t let him stand inside of the doorway. He would wait until everybody went by so he [would have to] walk straight across. Well, I pushed him out there one time, we carried a club, poked him in the back, you know. He turned around and he swung at me, and he hit me on the arm, so I gave him an awful belt in the kidneys. He never said a word to me [after that]. He didn’t like me; I know he didn’t like me. I had a couple confrontations with him, but other than Goering, the rest of them were all pretty good.

Albert Speer, many of them spoke English. I never heard Goering speak English. Albert Speer, he was Hitler’s architect, if you remember correctly. I always felt sorry for him. He was the architect, but he kind of got, I think, using the right word here, sucked into being a Nazi, and he turned out to be a Nazi. Of course, this was all for glory, I guess, for himself. I think Hitler just used him. He was a very calm-speaking individual. Always spoke to the guards. He was quite an artist. He never did me, but some of the other guys that pulled guard on some of these cell blocks, on his cell, he used to draw pencil sketches of them, and they were good. Very, very good. Imagine something like that’s worth a buck today. I don’t have that.

Let’s see, Streicher, he was a pain in the neck, complained all the time. Terrible, terrible. Going back just a little bit, when I pulled guard on the cell block, imagine standing there for an hour and watching the guy sleep through a little hole in the door, you know, it’s awful monotonous. The guys used to talk to one another, and the other guys would get to laughing. Some of them [prisoners] didn’t get much sleep at night. You kind of had to keep it down; when I was sergeant of the guard, sometimes you used to hear hollering down there, so I had to go down there and tell the guys to knock it off. Have you ever seen the old German pfennig? It’s their penny. It’s about as big as our half dollar. Well, one of the things they used to do at night, this wing had a terrazzo floor. These guys would roll these pennies down the terrazzo floor, and it sounded like a freight train coming down through there! [Laughs] I’m surprised that a lot of the German prisoners could stay awake in the courtroom the next day.

Another night, I was in the guard office, and I had a cot there, I was laying there. I could hear some screaming. I said, ‘Oh my God!’ I went down there and the guard at Streicher’s door, out of monotony, had taken a piece of paper and folded it, and he had ripped a little man out of it, so that when you opened it up, it was a man with just legs and arms like that and the head. And from off his uniform somewhere, he had tied a piece of string [tied to the neck of the effigy]. You had the light on just outside of the cell, and he’s swinging the thing in front of the light, and it’s [silhouetting] on the wall, a man hanging. [Chuckles] Jeez. I really don’t blame him for trying to get through the hours, standing there.

Let’s see, von Schirach, I pulled guard on the witness stand with him. He was head of the Hitler Youth. One day, there was quite a confrontation between him and Chief Justice Jackson. Of course, we could understand him. And he spoke decent English now, but most of his replies were in German. But through the interpreter, we could hear what was going on. They were arguing back and forth about the duties of the Hitler Youth. Well, they called a recess shortly after that, and he turned to me. I was on his left side. He turned to me, and he said, ‘But the Hitler Youth is nothing more than your Boy Scouts.’

I said, ‘Really?’ He doesn’t realize that I was a frontline soldier.

I said, ‘I fought your Hitler Youth!’ He never said a word [after that]. We found Hitler Youth that could take apart our BAR, our M1s, or any of our equipment. So they weren’t Boy Scouts like he wanted to portray them.

The rest of them were all just no problems, really. No problems. Alfred Jodl, he was a signer of the surrender terms. He didn’t talk to anybody. Him and Keitel, they weren’t Nazis, but they originally were Wehrmacht soldiers, and they were good soldiers. But of course, they turned into Nazis afterwards, you know?

*

I came home in July, yeah, about three months before the trial ended. [I was not present when Goering committed suicide]; I think [he died] the beginning of October, as I recall.  Everybody was trying to get their autographs. In fact, I have their autographs. All but Hess. Every time you’d ask Hess for his autograph, he spoke good English, because he spent quite a bit of time in England, he said, ‘after the trials.’

Well, you know what our favorite saying was? ‘You won’t be here after the trials.’

Nuremberg’s message endures:
No one, no matter how powerful, is above the law—and the world will remember.

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The power of love transcends time and space.

November 2, 2025 by Matthew Rozell

My mom passed away twenty years ago this morning.

She struggled with early onset Alzheimers for about twenty years. It was so hard to witness the decline, but I have to say that I think she was happy most of that time. She was beloved by the assisted living, and later the nursing home staff who cared for her at the end. She was gentle and sweet, and in her prime as the head school nurse teacher in her school district, no pushover when it came to advocating for her kids to those in power who stood in the way of affording them maximum attention and services. My sister and I sat with her in the wee hours after we learned she was no longer taking food. Exhausted, we headed home for a break around 2am that morning. We got the call about an hour later that she passed at 2:45, after we had left. I hardly remember her funeral, and it took years to get over it. A lot of anger to process. I’m not sure I’m over it yet, but there have been many signs and reminders that she is still with me.

Take this morning, for instance.

I woke up from a dream around 2:30 AM, and got up to walk to the bathroom. I noted the time, thinking of Mom. Actually I was doing some meta thinking—thinking about thinking of Mom—like, why did I wake up at this moment? The exact timing of her passing to the minutes twenty years on? Of course she’s been on my mind, but…

So I was walking by an antique low wattage lamp that remains on 24/7 near some stairs to light the path. Literally just as I passed it, behind my back, it started to flicker wildly, as some of these newfangled energy saving bulbs are apt to do when they are nearing the end, though it hasn’t ever done it before, and is not doing it now over 12 hours later. It sits on a desk my father built, alongside a bunch of my mom’s oversized art books. She loved the Impressionist painters. She loved to travel, frequently with my wife, who became her best friend and companion. I stopped in my tracks, and I thought, well, that’s weirdly appropriate.

It’s been quite a summer. First, the bedside clock at camp stopped at quarter to three. My father also died at that time, in the afternoon, 25 years ago this past August. Then the battery operated bedside clock here at home stopped at the same clock hour about a week later.

So when the exact moment rolled around again this morning, as I was returning to bed, just at the time Mom passed 20 years ago, I took this other pic. I kid you not, literally as I took it, the power to the whole house flickered, the bedside lamp, the night light, etc.

I am all alone in this big house. The kids have left the nest, and  Laura is traveling abroad, but I’m not creeped out. I’m comforted. If your parents were beloved and are no longer with us, I hope you are comforted by their presence yourself from time to time. For me, I am constantly reminded of my parents near me when I glance at a clock face and, ‘by chance’, it’s a quarter to three. It seems to be happening more frequently as I get on, but it’s all good.


Anyway, I’m no stranger to the power of love transcending time and space. It’s all over my book, A Train Near Magdeburg. There are no coincidences, and I’ll share an experience I wrote about in a previous post that helps to illustrate that point, once again. The 2017 post was titled, “Hope To See You In California.” Thanks for reading.

My second book, A Train Near Magdeburg, the one on the death train and my journey as a teacher in discovering and retracing the miracles in reuniting Holocaust survivors with their American soldier liberators, has had mostly positive reviews. Then recently someone posted how he found himself resenting that I had clumsily inserted my own experiences into an otherwise tremendous story. (Fair enough—but ‘resentment’?) That, coupled with a resurgence of antisemitism and the other stuff that bad dreams are made of sends a certain chill up this writer’s—this historian’s—spine.

Now if one really read, and ‘got’ the point of my second book, it’s about miracles and goodness and common human decency and humanity; about a triumph of the power of good and love over evil, against crazy odds; about the lessons and the values which we should hold firm to in a world filled with pain and destruction, deception and deceit. But some days it is hard to see the good, and the world lately frankly leaves me feeling rather adrift; I wonder if it all is pointless.

And then, out of the blue, comes the quiet reminder…

Later this week I got an email from a new fan in Salt Lake City, Utah. We have never met or heard of each other until he bought my books. He loved them, and then felt compelled to reach out to me (which I invite—it’s matthew@teachinghistorymatters.com). He wrote that as he neared the end of the book, he realized that his wife was from the area where I live and write about.
We went back and forth. Later on a whim he reached up on the bookshelf in his basement office and dusted off his wife’s high school yearbook. He opened it up, and sent me this:

mom-yrbk-1975

IT’S MY MOM.

Vintage 1975, autographing his wife’s graduating yearbook… turns out my mom was the school nurse teacher at his wife’s school, now nearly a continent away. Kim was heading out west after graduation, and my mother was going to head there to visit her brother and his family in California that summer. Neither I nor my siblings had ever seen this photo before; I can tell by her expression that Mom is laughing with the photographer and is insisting that he get the shot over with!

So now, on a dark day, my mother is speaking to me. She was taken from us in 2005, just before the Holocaust survivors I write about found me in 2006 and entered my life and the lives of the soldiers who freed them in such a profound way. My mother reaches out  to remind me that there is still good in the world.

Maybe that reviewer could care less, but my mom will always be a part of the story—MY story. Thanks, William, for sending it to me. And thanks Ma, for being there for me again.

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A Night For Remembering.

September 26, 2025 by Matthew Rozell

Fall is here, and two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be on stage with the director of the film for A Train Near Magdeburg to preview a snippet of the film and be a part of a panel of folks who are in the film. So on the 24th anniversary of 9.11, we sat on the stage of a community center near Columbus, Ohio to participate in a panel discussion in an evening of remembrance on a little-known pivotal moment in history.
To my right was a German girl who wasn’t even born in 2001. To my left was a Holocaust survivor was was on the train as a bewildered six year-old boy, a friend who has lived within sight of the Twin Towers for decades. On his left was a daughter of the WWII tank commander who I interviewed that summer of 2001, before those towers came down and the world seemed to stop. On the far right sat the director, a good friend now who I have been working with for the past decade.

All that morning beforehand I spoke to students, younger than the German girl—born long after 9.11.2001 into a ‘new world’—about my experiences surrounding events that took place on April 13, 1945, sixteen years before I myself was born. As I reflect—and process, really—on that evening now, two weeks on, a few thoughts are crystalizing in that wake of our national remembrance of 9.11.2001 and the political assassination that unfolded the day before—and the resulting tide of outrage and finger pointing which was threatening to tear our nation asunder anew by the time we took the stage. Literally as the killing was unfolding a thousand miles across the country, we were working with those young Americans in those classrooms, cultivating a sense of beauty, wonder, love, honor, inspiration, and resilience in our young people.

NEW ALBANY SEPT 2025 orchestral workshop with students. Video by Matthew Rozell.
Oscar S. and Micha M., two survivors of the Train Near Magdeburg, meet for the first time at the Ohio governor’s mansion, 9.9.2025. Matthew Rozell photo.

But that evening, we were there to speak to a moment in history when young men were faced with a choice—soldiers headed into a battle in which many would be killed—and chose compassion and humanitarianism, at great personal cost that in many cases would haunt them for decades thereafter. We were there to talk about a story that will unite Americans in a time of national division—no magic bullet to heal our woes, certainly, but a story of healing regardless. And it’s all true, it really happened, the result of many miracles that has resulted in tens of thousands of people being alive today, as documented by filmmaker Mike Edwards, who was the moderator for the evening.

And now Mike himself is being drawn into the vortex of the cosmic power of love transcending time and space, having reached out and gotten a response from the first family on the 2500-name survivor passenger manifest list—two and a half times the size of Oscar Schindler’s list—living in the Netherlands, who had no idea about this story. Mike’s in Europe and has visited that family in Amsterdam on this latest trip he is on.

It never ends, as I stated in the discussion. And that is a good thing. We want to Heal the World, in our own way…

[A link to the panel discussion video is below, containing also a short trailer for the film. (Warning: I talk a lot!) Photos not credited above and and video below courtesy of the City of New Albany, Ohio.]

CLICK FOR LINK TO THE BOOK

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A Train Near Magdeburg Film Series- Events Kick Off Week-Sept. 11-14, 2025

August 15, 2025 by Matthew Rozell

This is a notice for those of you who may be interested, especially Soldier/Survivor/2nd/3rd Gen families who may not have seen the social media posts and advance press releases. It takes place in Columbus, Ohio, where Mike Edwards the director, and the Augusta Chiwy Foundation, the organizational apparatus for steering the film to the light of day, are based. Some of you may also be previous donors to the foundation in the name of the film–this is also especially for you, with gratitude. The dates are below but the main kick off event is Thursday, September 11, 2025 in association with the New Albany, Ohio community and school system.

A Train Near Magdeburg Film Series- Events Kick Off Week, In Celebration of 80th Anniversary of Liberation and the Film Series Panel Discussion (Public, but seating limited, reserve below asap!) and also special Sneak Preview (Invitation Only, write to Matthew at matthew@matthewrozellbooksdot com for inquiries, especially if you are Soldier/Survivor/2nd/3rd Gen!]


September 11-14, 2025
Columbus, Ohio
Thursday September 11: 7pm-9:30pm-PUBLIC/SEATING LIMITED!/REGISTRATION REQUIRED! FREE! BUT ACT FAST!!!
Opening Program- Keynote Speech, Panel Discussion and The Violins of Hope, Abadi Holocaust Artwork
The McCoy Center: 100 E. Dublin Granville Road, New Albany, Ohio 43054
Registration and Tickets Link: https://newalbanyohio.org/programs-and-events/atrainnearmagdeburg/

Mark your calendars for an unforgettable evening in New Albany, Ohio on Thursday, September 11th at 7pm as we bring to life the extraordinary story of A Train Near Magdeburg that will leave you inspired and in awe. This is your chance to be part of history—and trust us, you won’t want to miss it! Tickets are FREE, but they’re disappearing fast, and seating is limited—secure yours NOW before it’s too late!

We’re thrilled to share that at least two survivors of the train will be in attendance, with one joining a powerful panel discussion to share their deeply moving story firsthand. This is a rare opportunity to hear directly from those who lived through a pivotal moment in history.

But that’s not all! The evening will feature a special appearance by Matthew Rozell, renowned educator and historian, alongside the daughter of one of the key liberators, sharing insights that will bring this incredible story to life. The evening will also include an appearance by former German high school student, Johanna Mücke, who experienced the power of this story firsthand in her own hometown, at the site of the liberation, and has dedicated her life to keeping the story alive for future generations.

And lastly, be prepare to be captivated by a breathtaking performance on the world-famous Violins of Hope, played by virtuoso musicians from the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, filling the air with music that resonates with hope and resilience.

This is more than an event—it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to connect with history, honor courage, and celebrate the human spirit. Grab your tickets now and join us for an evening that will stay with you forever!

Friday September 12: 11:30am-1:30pm-PUBLIC
Liberator Family Appreciation Luncheon and Keynote Address
National Veterans Memorial and Museum: 300 West Broad Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215
Keynote Speaker: Brigadier General Charles W. Morrison, Representing The 30th Infantry Division

REGISTER HERE FOR TIX: https://my.nationalvmm.org/25educationprograms/trainmagdeburg


Saturday September 13: 7pm-10pm
Social Gathering FOR Donors/Soldier/Survivor/2nd/3rd Gen families / Ohio State vs. Ohio Football Watch Party
Renaissance Hotel Columbus, 50 North Third Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215


Sunday September 14: 1pm-4pm
A Train Near Magdeburg Screening (Invitation Only, write to Matthew at matthew@matthewrozellbooksdot com for inquiries, especially if you are Donor/Soldier/Survivor/2nd/3rd Gen!]): Episodes 1-3 (of 4)
Location: To Be Determined

UPDATES ON THE FILM: https://magdeburgtrain.com/
Hotel Reservation Link: https://book.passkey.com/go/MagdeburgPremier

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“I’m Still Seventeen to You Now.”

August 1, 2025 by Matthew Rozell

TEN YEARS AGO, my first book was published.

Eight years before that, my high schoolers and I sat down with Jim and Mary Butterfield for what would turn out to be the last time.

They are featured in that first book, The Things Our Fathers Saw, Vol. 1-Voices of the Pacific. And their story is one of my favorites.

Mary and Jim Butterfield Jan. 2007

Jimmy used to come to my classroom with his bride of 65+ years, Mary. She would joke with him, and us, and call him by his high school nickname, “But”. Maybe it was “Butt”, I don’t know, but they had fun playing around with each other in front of 17 and 18 year olds.

The two of them, and Danny Lawler, another First Marine Division veteran of really hard fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa, came to my room for an afternoon. Later, I came home to an email from one of my senior girls, telling me how meaningful meeting Jimmy and Mary and Danny was to her and her classmates.

Jimmy, of course was blind and hard of hearing. Mary had to yell at him, he would crack a grin under the dark glasses and flirt with her. The high school girls loved it.

You see, Jimmy Butterfield got struck not once but twice in the head by enemy fire at Okinawa on May 19, 1945. He was evacuated first to Guam, then to Hawaii and later stateside for over 18 months and as many for reconstructive surgery. It was clear early on, though, that he would never see again.

To everyone but Jimmy.

When he eventually was ‘informed’, he told us that he instructed his high school sweetheart to leave him be. Not to get attached to him, a blind man.

Well, she told us what she thought of that. They ran a small mom and pop store back in Glens Falls together until they retired.

Mary passed in the fall of 2013. Jimmy died at home the following spring. What obstacles they overcame together. Below, from Vol. 1, they recount how Jimmy learned, weeks after the battle, that he would never see again.

Jimmy: I didn’t know, until they told me there [in the hospital in Hawaii].

So here’s the climax. Every morning there was inspection with the doctors. So the doctor came around that morning. He said, ‘How are you, Jim?’

I said, ‘Fine.’ He said, ‘You need anything?’ I said, ‘Nope, I’m doing fine.’ He says, ‘Well, are you used to the idea?’ I said, ‘Used to what idea?’

He said, ‘That you’re not going to see again.’


Well, you could hear a pin drop. I said, ‘I don’t think I heard you, Doc.’ He said, ‘You’re not going to see again.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Didn’t they tell you in Guam?’


I said, ‘No! But it’s a good thing that [first] doctor isn’t here, because I’d kill him!’ I got so mad! I couldn’t really grab the idea. I’m not going to see again? … What the hell did I know about blindness? Nothing!


I said, ‘How about operations?’

He said, ‘You’ve got nothing to work with, Jimmy.’


So a pat on the shoulder, and he just walks away. The nurse comes over and says, ‘The doctor wants you to take this pill.’ I said, ‘You know what the doctor can do with that pill?’


Mary: Don’t say it.


Jim: I’m not going to, Mary.


So I had a hard… two months, I guess. I kept mostly to myself. I wouldn’t talk to people. I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do when I got home. How was I going to tell my mother this? You know what I mean?


So they come around and said, ‘You’ve got a phone call.’ So I went in to where the phone was. They were calling me from home. They got the message, see…

This one here was on the phone [points to Mary].

I said, ‘Looks like things have changed, kiddo.’

She said, ‘No, we’ll discuss this when you get home.’ She was already bossing me around. [Laughter]
But that’s how I found out, and that’s how it happened. And after a while, I just started to live with it.


There are not days—even today—I go to bed and I wish I could see. So much I miss. I miss watching a nice girl walking down the street. I miss seeing my daughter, my wife. I even miss looking at Danny. [Laughter]


Mary: But you see, I’m only seventeen to you now. That’s a good thing.


Jim: Since we got in the conversation, when I dream, and I do dream, everything is real. Everything I knew before, I see it as it was then, not today. My wife and daughter would never get old in my eyes. When I dream of Mary, she’s still seventeen years old.


Mary: But you never saw your daughter.


Jim: I dream about my daughter. Mary’s caught me doing this. We lost our daughter a year and a half ago. But I sit right up in bed and I’m trying to push away that little cloud of fog in front of her, but I can’t quite make her out.


Mary says, ‘What are you doing?’ I say, ‘Just dreaming.’

Jim Butterfield was nineteen years old at the Battle of Okinawa.
In the final push at the Shuri Line that cost him his eyesight, the Marines lost over 3,000 men and the U. S. Army even more. When the island was declared secure near the end of June, in Lawler’s K/3/5, only 26 Peleliu veterans who had landed with the company had survived Okinawa. It had been the bloodiest campaign of the Pacific, with over 12,500 Americans killed or missing and nearly three times that number wounded. For the Japanese, no accurate counts are possible, but perhaps 110,000 were killed.

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Narrated by Sir David Suchet.

July 4, 2025 by Matthew Rozell

Below is a post by my friend and our project screenwriter Lee Shackleford announcing that Sir David Suchet has signed on to narrate our four part mini-series. I was a part of a Zoom call to meet him, from London, last December, a very humble and gracious man.  He concluded our meeting by saying, “I’m here and I’m with you all. And listen also, Matt, no more ‘Sir’. I’m just David. I’m part of the team. No hierarchy. It’s very nice to be a ‘Sir’ but I never expect [to be addressed so]… it doesn’t sit that easily on me. But I believe now that I am [with you and the team] I’m a member of a wonderful family!”

Here is to seeing it all come to fruition before next December rolls around!

Stay tuned for more announcements! You can also follow the mini-series announcements and previews and opportunities to support at https://magdeburgtrain.com/.

We are beyond elated to announce that one of the world’s finest and most widely-acclaimed actors has joined the adventure of A Train Near Magdeburg. Our narration will be performed by none other than Sir David Suchet, multiple-award-winning star of stage and screen.

Though he has been performing professionally since 1969 (!) he is best-known around the world for his portrayal of Agatha Christie’s eccentric detective Hercules Poirot in the long-running TV series Poirot.

While we were searching for exactly the right talent for our narrator, Sir David was looking for us — that is, for a way to add his talents to a significant story about Jews in the Holocaust. He is himself of Lithuanian-Jewish descent; his father was “Suchedowitz” in the old country. He told us he has recently learned more about the fate of his Lithuanian relatives during the Holocaust and has since been eager to honor their legacy with a project like ours. 

Sir David has recently completed an extraordinary tour of the world following the path once taken by Agatha Christie, with whom he naturally feels a strong personal bond. That entire adventure can be seen in the outstanding documentary series Travels with Agatha Christie & Sir David Suchet.

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Day of Days.

June 6, 2025 by Matthew Rozell

June 6, 1944
Amsterdam
 
‘This is D-Day,’ the BBC announced at 12 o’clock. This is the day. The invasion has begun!
Is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation? The liberation we’ve all talked so much about, which still seems too good, too much of a fairy tale ever to come true?…
The best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are on the way. Those terrible Germans have oppressed and threatened us for so long that the thought of friends and salvation means everything to us!
 
― Anne Frank, diary entry,
six days before her 15th birthday

Forty-one years ago today, I tuned in to a small black and white TV in a ramshackle white clapboard farmhouse I shared with three or four other guys my age. I was 23, a recent college graduate with a seemingly useless history degree, working in the back of a kitchen of a high end restaurant in my college town. I wasn’t sure still what my direction was, but I had a knack for churning out long history papers running forty or fifty pages in length, and a passion for World War II, especially D-Day. Well, I reluctantly turned to teaching—I had student loans to pay—but I grew into another passion, sharing my love of history, and engaging veterans with students, creating an oral history project which has now reached ten books and counting, as well as an upcoming film series.

But today, June 6, 2024, it is now the 80th anniversary, and my mind is focused on how my life has turned out. I realize that I am the age of many of the veterans were when forty years ago, I watched as the American president honored the fallen, and the living, at the cemetery for the fortieth anniversary. Just out of college, something stirred inside me. Something was awoken.

Those forty years have passed. I began by writing letters to the newspaper. I began to interview D-Day veterans and others. I began to collect stories—not relics, prizes, or artifacts. I really had little interest in captured Nazi flags or samurai swords.

I wanted to talk to the men who were there.

The fiftieth anniversary came next with great pomp and more reflection. It graced the covers of the major newsweeklies. ‘Saving Private Ryan’ would soon stir the consciousness of a new generation, and the reflections of the old. And I learned so much more of the war beyond the beachhead. That there were so many beachheads.

The sixtieth anniversary came around. Students on their annual trips to France would bring me back their photographs and the requisite grains of white sand from Omaha Beach. Teenagers had their emotions a bit tempered, I think. I would go on to introduce them to so many who were there, when they themselves were teenagers.

Normandy American Cemetery, Spring 2022. Photo by Mike Edwards.

While filming for our 2025 documentary series A Train Near Magdeburg, two years ago I finally had the chance to set foot on Omaha Beach with an excellent guide who was insistent that we arrive early in the morning to catch the tide as it began to roll in. It was an astounding thing, to witness the 10 to 12 foot rise in the course of only a few hours. Imagine the men struggling to find their footing, pinned down by murderous fire. The 743rd Tank Battalion, liberators of the Train Near Magdeburg ten months later in the heart of Nazi Germany, was one of five tank battalions that took part in those initial landings, planned for H-Hour in support of the 29th Infantry Division in specially outfitted duplex drive ‘swimming’ amphibious Sherman tanks, powered by propellers in water and tracks on land and equipped with inflatable canvas flotation screens.

Bill Gast awarded the Silver Star.

Bill Gast was one of those tank drivers. I first met Bill at a reunion of 30th Infantry Division and 743rd Tank Battalion soldiers at a reunion in March 2008, in which I was present with several Holocaust survivors who were meeting their liberating soldiers for the first time. Later, Bill came to my high school to speak to students. I think the experience of sharing, and meeting the Holocaust survivors whom the 743rd came upon and liberated, affected him deeply. It was really the first time that he opened up, several hundred students as his primary witnesses. Unlike many who were physically able, Bill had no intention of going back to the sands of Omaha for any anniversary. As he explained to our students in 2009,

“I’m listed [in the event program] as a liberator- however, I am also a survivor of World War II, having landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France on D-day and fighting through to the end when the Germans surrendered, May the 7th, 1945.”

“Pictures.

Video games.

Movies.

Words.

They simply do not covey the feeling of fear.

The shock.

The stench.

The noise.

The horror, and the tragedy.

The injured.

The suffering.

The dying, and the dead…

Freedom is not free; there is a high price tag attached.”

Video tribute by Mike Edwards, Director, A Train Near Magdeburg.

Bill left us in 2018 at the age of 94. Against many odds, today nearly 200 surviving D-Day veterans gather, most probably for the last time, to honor the fallen from the nations engaged in storming ‘Fortress Europe’.

Today, the ocean laps at the lateral thirty-five-mile advance of sand littered with relics of a different time, the hulking remnants of the tide of battle. The surf rolls in and kisses the beach as the last participants mix on the hallowed bluff above with the politicians who have gathered from all over the world. In 1984, President Reagan asked, “Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here?

He continued: “These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war…We look at you, and somehow, we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.”[1]

Wayne Robinson, the chronicler of the 743rd’s travails and exploits during the war, wrote this in 1945 at war’s end:

“The story of D-Day is the story of all who. were there—jeep drivers, truckdrivers, halftrack crews, supply and communications men as well as the tankers. Many—too many—of the stories were posthumous.

The Presidential Unit Citation was awarded the Battalion for the day’s fighting. There were the D.S.C.s won, and a galaxy of Silver Stars and Bronze Stars. But the Battalion was not thinking of glory as it fought its way through Exit D-1 toward Vierville-Sur-Mer. Glory is a tainted angel to tankers who have just had to run their steel treads over the bodies of fallen Gls because there was no other way to advance over sand cluttered with American dead and wounded. ‘If there was any sign of life at all, I tried to avoid them’, one tank driver said. ‘But buttoned up, looking through the scope, it was hard to see. You just had to run over them.’

In war there is no easy way. The grinding tracks of the Battalion’s tanks trailed blood through the ·sand, rolling inland off the beach. The whole war in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany was ahead of them.”[2]

And for the men of the 743rd’s Dog Company, ahead there would be this train, a long shabby string of boxcars and shabby passenger cars, spectral creatures milling about, listless, sick, and fearful…

D-Day: the view from a tank on Omaha Beach

By Mathieu Rabechault May 23, 2014 6:46 AM

Washington (AFP) – From inside his tank, the young soldier could see “practically nothing” on Omaha Beach.

Seventy years later, William Gast still wonders whether he rolled over his comrades sheltering from German gunfire that day.

Gast was 19 years old the morning of June 6, 1944. “We came in at H-10, that was 10 minutes before the designated hour.”

He cannot recall why he and his fellow soldiers arrived early, but he has other memories that have never left him.

As part of Company A, 743rd Tank Battalion, 1st Army, Gast remembers the training beforehand in Britain, when he rehearsed driving the Sherman tank onto the landing craft. And then floating in the English Channel.

“Another night we went out and we didn’t come back. That was it.”

Gast got to know the captain of the landing craft that would ferry his tank to the beaches of Normandy.

The skipper promised he would get them close enough that they would not be submerged in water, like so many tanks were that day.

He kept his word.

Another tank unit at Omaha Beach was less fortunate, with 27 of 32 tanks launched at sea five kilometers (three miles) from the coast sinking before they could reach land, despite being outfitted with a flotation screens.

“The order was given to go, we started our engines up, they lowered the ramp,” said Gast.

Amid German shrapnel and sea spray, he “could feel the tracks spinning.”

At last, the tank tracks took hold on the sandy sea bottom and he drove up the beach.

– Like throwing marbles at a car –

Down below in the driver’s seat, Gast tried to steer the tank with the aid of a small, manual periscope.

“You can imagine how much we could see, practically nothing,” he said.

The radios inside the tank were so unreliable that his commander would tell Gast which way to turn by kicking him on the left or right shoulder.

The difficulty in seeing the way ahead has left Gast with a gnawing sense that he may have run over the bodies of American soldiers on the beach.

“The saddest part about the whole thing is, not being able to see, I may have run over some of my own people.

“And if I did, I don’t even know it. I can’t ever get that out of my mind, you know?”

Corporal Gast heard machine gun bullets hitting the side of the tank, “like throwing marbles at a car — that’s what it sounded like.”

“And there were shells that exploded right beside me. You could feel the tank shake.”

For Gast, it was a day of fear and terror, and following orders without reflection.

“I can’t tell much about what happened, I was scared to death to start with,” he said.

“It was just like putting it on automatic, you just did what you had to do, did what you were told to do.”

By noon, close to 19,000 American soldiers who landed at Omaha were still pinned down on the beach.

– High school sweetheart –

Carefully laid plans had unraveled as the beach became a killing zone, with troops mowed down under a fusillade of German machine gun, artillery and mortar fire.

Small teams of US troops eventually managed to break through on the bluffs between German positions, with the help of combat engineers blowing up obstacles.

The losses were staggering: more than 2,000 dead, wounded and missing on Omaha beach. The exact toll is still unknown. Of the 15 tanks in Gast’s Company A, only five survived without damage.

Gast, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, earned the Silver Star and the Purple Heart during his combat tour, and went on to marry his high school sweetheart.

Mr. & Mrs. Gast, Holocaust Survivors-American Soldiers reunion, 2009.

Mr. & Mrs. Gast, Holocaust Survivors-American Soldiers reunion, 2009.

Now 89 years old, he recently was awarded France’s Legion d’Honneur at a small ceremony for World War II veterans at the French embassy in Washington.

The short, soft spoken man stood up to receive the medal and shook hands with a French diplomat. But he has no plans to return to Normandy for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

His son, Bill, said his father did not want to relive that day: “It’s important we don’t forget but you try to hide things somewhere.”

news.yahoo.com/d-day-view-tank-omaha-beach-104656852.html

[1] Why did you do it?-President Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1984, Omaha Beach, Normandy, France. http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/reagan-d-day.htm

[2] Robinson, Wayne; and Hamilton, Norman E., Move Out, Verify: The Combat Story of the 743rd Tank Battalion. 1945. World War Regimental Histories. United States Army.

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