Teaching History Matters

I hope you’ll never have to tell a story like this, when you get to be 87.  I hope you’ll never have to do it.

 ― Marine veteran of the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima, to his teenage interviewer

Ralph Leinoff, a Marine who fought at the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II, stands in front of the drawing he modeled after Joseph Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of five Marines and one Navy corpsman raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi. (Portrait by Erica Miller, courtesy the Saratogian)

Last night I did my first public reading from the book, The Things Our Fathers Saw. The turnout was great for a lovely summer evening, and I was especially gratified to meet the extended family of one of the book’s main narrators, Iwo Jima veteran Ralph Leinoff.

Ralph loved people, and he spent much time sharing his story with our young people especially. He did not like to get into the grit and the gore, but he told enough to  show why this history should not be forgotten. In fact, his quote above is the lede for the book on the back cover, and interior.

In my book I tell the story of how he came to draw the iconic photograph that he witnessed, right there in the thick of the battle for Iwo Jima, where 7000 US Marines would fall, including many of his friends.

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Matthew Rozell’s career as a history teacher is now spanning four decades. Over the course of the past 20 years, he and his students conducted hundreds of interviews with the World War II generation. One such interview led to the reuniting of a train transport of Holocaust survivors with their American liberators, over 60 years later. He is currently working on a trilogy of narrative histories based on these interviews.

His first book, a narrative of World War II in the Pacific as told through the previously unpublished recollections of over 30 veterans, was released in August. It is available here.  His second book, in progress, is on the power of  teaching, remembering the Holocaust, and the real story behind the  iconic photo of the “Train Near Magdeburg’. He can be reached at his Facebook page at Author Matthew Rozell or by commenting below.