Most recent article update. Seven survivors or their families have come forward to say they see themselves and or their families in this miracle footage. The footage has now been seen over 100K times at my YouTube channel, and probably millions of times at the worldwide newspaper/media coverage.You can subscribe there for updates if you wish.
Matthew Rozell has spent decades preserving oral testimonies of veterans and Holocaust survivors, especially the memories of 2,500 people rescued from a Nazi death train at the end of the war
Patrick Tine/Albany Times Union
Sep. 3, 2023
History teacher Matthew Rozell looks over film footage of WWII concentration camp survivors that was recently discovered in the National Archive on Aug. 24 in Glens Falls.
On Friday, April 13, 1945, Sgt. Carrol “Red” Walsh, assigned to D Company of the 743rd Tank Battalion, was steeling himself for the planned assault on the strategically important German city of Magdeburg on the Elbe River.
Word of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death the day before had just reached the front lines, punctuating a harrowing 10 months of near-ceaseless combat. His battalion, which was attached to the 30th Infantry Division, had landed at Normandy a month after D-Day in July 1944. They had held off the German counteroffensive at Mortain, were among the first Allied troops in Belgium and Netherlands and had nearly frozen to death during some of the most punishing engagements of the entire war during the Battle of the Bulge.
Before the operation to take the city, Maj. Clarence Benjamin ordered Walsh and another soldier to get in their tanks and follow his Jeep. They needed to investigate a train stopped in a ravine a few miles away in the tiny village of Farsleben.
Twenty-five hundred Jewish men, women and children from across Europe who had been deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were aboard the train. Those with the strength to disembark were making their way up the embankment. Maj. Benjamin snapped a photo that encapsulated the range of emotions the now-former prisoners were feeling. A terrified mother and daughter in the foreground, fearful after years of captivity that there were further horrors to come, and a gaunt woman in the background, dazed but smiling at the realization that liberation was finally at hand.
Survivors rest on the embankment are seen next to the stopped train in Farsleben. /
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
The events of that day became part of the life’s work of Matthew Rozell, a retired Hudson Falls history teacher who has been compiling the oral histories of the people on that train and the men who liberated them.
Rozell recounts the events that became known as the “Miracle at Farsleben” in minute detail, from memory and with no notes. He does not need them.
Missing from Rozell’s voluminous records and testimonies about the train liberation was any footage of the events. Rozell knew the U.S. Army Signal Corps had been at Farsleben filming but in years of research neither he nor seemingly any other historian or Holocaust filmmaker had found any footage.
Then, an assistant from the small museum in Farsleben got in touch two months ago. He had seen a snippet of the train liberation in a documentary that had recently aired on German television.
“(The assistant) said ‘I don’t know if this is the Farsleben train,’” Rozell said. “I looked at it and said ‘That’s the train.’” Other than the survivors and liberators, no one would know better than Rozell.
He got a record number from the National Archives and Records Administration and was able to track the video down. Rozell put it on YouTube where it has been viewed nearly 100,000 times.
Work started decades ago
It is a fitting, final piece to a project that began more than 30 years ago.
From an office at the Shirt Factory in Glens Falls where books of his oral histories and old newspapers spanning the length of the war line the room, Rozell explained how the project began in 1991 when he asked his class, by show of hands, how many of their grandparents had served in World War II or Korea.
“Every kid in the classroom raised both hands,” Rozell said.
Conversations between students and their relatives turned into tape-recorded class visits by veterans, which students dutifully transcribed on early word processors from VHS tape. One of his students was the grandson of Carroll “Red” Walsh, the private who went on to a career as a New York state Supreme Court judge after the war. Walsh was from Johnstown and a graduate of Albany Law School. He died in 2012.
Rozell starting doing interviews during the summer and began posting testimonies and photographs on a website hosted by the school. To his surprise, he found out that professional historians were directing survivors, who were children at the time, to his website.
“I had no idea until I got an email from a grandmother in Australia,” Rozell said. “I heard from a professor of physics at Brooklyn College who was a 6-year-old Jewish boy on the train. I heard from a retired Israeli airline executive in New Jersey who had been a 13-year-old German Jew on the train. I heard from a doctor in London who had been a 6-year-old Hungarian boy on the train.”
A woman and two children rest next to the stopped train, the day after it was liberated on April 14, 1945. /United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
Survivors journeyed to Hudson Falls in 2009 to meet the man who had become a keeper of their shared memory and the soldiers who rescued them.
The gathering was joyous.
Recounting misery and freedom
They also recounted the misery they endured. The group, which included about 500 children, had been forced onto the train at Bergen-Belsen in northwestern Germany and sent southeast toward Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in an attempt to outrun the Americans and the Soviets. Certain death either from either rampant disease (Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, had died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen weeks earlier) or execution by the SS awaited them.
But the SS men abandoned the train at Farsleben after hearing American armor was in the area, Rozell recounted. The engineer decoupled his locomotive from the train and disappeared. At gunpoint, American GIs ordered the townspeople to house the freed prisoners. Bakeries were opened and cattle were slaughtered to feed them.
Rozell, for his part, received enormous acclaim for his work. He was highlighted as an “ABC World News” person of the week and got a teaching fellowship from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
He’s working on a documentary now with British broadcaster ITV. It is scheduled to air in late 2024.
Until then Rozell’s website, books, and his indefatigable memory will stand as the vital and timeless repository for this miracle at the end of the war.
https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/hudson-falls-teacher-uncovers-video-miraculous-18324555.php
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