Twenty-five years ago, I was about to shut off a video camera. I had spent the better part of an afternoon interviewing a tank commander named Carrol Walsh for a classroom oral history project, and his daughter Elizabeth, sitting nearby, asked a question of her father that changed the course of my life: “Dad, did you tell Mr. Rozell about the train?”
On a recent Sunday morning, that question found its way into living rooms across the country. CBS Sunday Morning, with correspondent Seth Doane, told the story of the train near Magdeburg, and that project which began with a handful of teenagers and an antiquated camcorder in Hudson Falls, New York, reached that stage.
The segment begins where the story truly begins, in a dresser drawer. Elizabeth Connolly remembers playing with her father’s toy soldiers as a little girl, and finding an envelope of photographs beside them: a mother holding a child’s hand as they climbed a hill, and a woman standing behind them, very thin. “They don’t look like any of our relatives,” she remembered thinking. Her father would only say they were people he had come upon on a train.
From there, Seth and the CBS team followed the thread to London, where Peter Lantos, who was five years old when he was put on that train with his mother, sat down to talk about the day the shouting started and people cried out that the Americans had come. Peter is now eighty-six. He told Seth why he speaks about it, though he does not enjoy it: “Because we are the last survivors.” We also heard from James Bulgin of the Imperial War Museum, who understands better than anyone how the chaos at the end of the war produced a story like this one, and from filmmaker Mike Edwards, whose upcoming documentary, A Train Near Magdeburg, is now on its way to the screen in 2027. Mike shared what he tells the students who watch the film: each of them will have a train near Magdeburg moment, a choice about whether to care about another human being. The soldiers did not have to stop. They did.
I closed my own portion of the segment with a question that has followed me through all these years. We say “never forget,” and it is a fine mantra. But what if you never learned it to begin with?
That question is the reason there is a second book.
ONE SECOND BEFORE MIDNIGHT: The Continuing Story of A Train Near Magdeburg is now available for pre-order.
When the first book was published in 2016, I believed the story was told. It was not. In the decade since, new survivors have come forward, and new soldiers have been identified. Descendants have found me with photographs, letters, and questions of their own. I have walked the ground at Farsleben and Hillersleben with young German students who have taken up the work of memory as their own and want to build monuments where the train once stood. I traveled to Israel in the spring of 2023 to sit with survivors in their homes and kibbutzim, some of whom I had corresponded with for years and had never met face to face. And in 2026, more than three hundred descendants of the train gathered together, the children and grandchildren of the people who were on it and of the men who stopped for them.
One Second Before Midnight is the story of all of that. It is a book about what happens when a history you thought was finished reaches for you again, seventy and eighty years later: the tears, the mothers, the resisters, the bells that still ring. It also follows the soldiers’ footsteps from Normandy to Bergen-Belsen and back to the fields of Saxony-Anhalt, where the train was found.
If you read the first book, this is where the story continues. If you are new to it, the book stands on its own, and I hope it will bring you to the beginning as well.
Pre-order here:
Available in paperback, hardback, audiobook and e-book.
To everyone who has followed this journey, to the survivors and liberators whose names fill these pages, and to the students, teachers, and families who have carried it forward, thank you. The train is still moving.
Matthew Rozell
