A Train Near Magdeburg: A Teacher's Journey into the Holocaust, and the Reuniting of the Survivors and Liberators, 70 Years On

by Matthew A. Rozell 

In April 1945, American soldiers fighting their way across Germany came upon a train, abandoned on the tracks, packed with thousands of Holocaust victims on the edge of death. What those soldiers did next, and who they saved, became one of the most extraordinary and least known liberation stories of World War Two.

Years later, teacher and historian Matthew Rozell found a photograph from that day in a veteran's shoebox, and spent years tracking down the people in it. His search uncovered never before published eyewitness accounts, survivor testimony, wartime letters, and reports, and led to reunions on three continents between the liberators and the people they saved.

Drawing on firsthand testimony from fifteen American liberators and more than thirty Holocaust survivors, along with wartime reports, letters, memoirs, photographs, and research conducted at the actual sites, Rozell reconstructs both sides of an extraordinary moment in the closing days of the Third Reich: the survivors' path through persecution, deportation, and imprisonment; the soldiers' brutal campaign across Europe; and the moment their lives unexpectedly intersected beside a train in Nazi Germany.

But the story did not end in 1945. More than sixty years later, Rozell's investigation helped reconnect hundreds of survivors and their descendants with the American soldiers who had liberated them, preserving eyewitness accounts that might otherwise have disappeared with the passing of the wartime generation.

Part World War Two military history, part Holocaust testimony, part historical detective story, this is a documented account of ordinary people caught inside one of history's darkest events, and of the soldiers who arrived in time to save lives.