| Welcome to 2025, a momentous year for World War II remembrance and history. So glad that you can join us for these updates, the ‘octogintennial’ anniversary of the end of the war, and of the greatest crime in the history of the world, the Holocaust.Today is special for several reasons, two of which I will outline below. |
Road to St. Vith, January 24, 1945. National Archives.
On December 16, 1944, the Battle of the Bulge began as Hitler’s last ditch effort to drive a wedge between the advancing American and British forces with a quarter million man German counteroffensive following D-Day and the Normandy breakouts of the summer and fall. Today, January 25, eighty years ago, all German forces had been pushed back to their original starting points; while the fight was not over for a long shot, today marked a turning point in the war in Europe. Nineteen thousand American boys were killed in the bloodiest US battle of WWII, over the course of six weeks, in the coldest winter in European memory. Average age, 19. 80 years? Was it really that long ago? USHMM via Reuters. Also on this day in 1945, the German SS dynamited the building of gas chamber and crematorium V in Auschwitz-Birkenau to destroy the evidence of their crimes as the Red Army approached from the east. The liberation of Auschwitz, the most notorious killing center of World War II, was at hand, the eightieth anniversary of which will be commemorated on Monday, January 27; one of my good Holocaust educator friends is co-leading a delegation of 50 or so survivors for this occasion. Talli and I were there together in an emotional journey I wrote about in my book, A Train Near Magdeburg. This gas chamber operated from April 1943 to January 1945; Zyklon B was dumped in through openings after people were inside. 1.1 million people were murdered here, in a VERY short amount of time. So what does it all mean, eighty years on? Time marches on, but as you may have read in my books, it’s not so much ‘how soon we forget’, as it is, ‘did we take the time to listen‘ the first time around, to our teachers, to our veterans? Do we as Americans even know our history? You know, in my books, I let the veterans and survivors speak for themselves, and for their friends and family who were killed or murdered. [I’m preaching to the choir now, and that’s the last thing I want to do-but hopefully we don’t move on until we pause and say their names.] And I’ll leave you with an upbeat note- I went into the classroom again in December to talk about Pearl Harbor and a local kid who died there, as I discussed in my first book, The Things Our Fathers Saw, Vol. 1, Voices of the Pacific. First time since retirement, and I’m happy to report the old man still has it, and the teenagers were HUNGRY for this knowledge, just like they were when I taught them at this high school in upstate NY. I left them all with free copies of that book with 19 year old Randy Holmes remembered in it. I’ll leave you with some books mentioned in this email below for further reading, and report back soon with some updates as 2025 moves on, with the anniversaries, and with our upcoming mini-series.Exciting! ~Matthew Rozell, Author/Educator |
Teaching History Matters 