delight
A student's grandmother asked about a train. It saved a story.
He was about to shut off the camera. Then the old soldier kept talking.
A high school oral history project in Hudson Falls, New York, ended up recovering the story of a little-known WWII liberation, all because a student's grandmother interrupted the interview to ask about a train. Teacher Matt Rozell was filming veteran Carrol Walsh in 2001 when Walsh's daughter, Elizabeth Connolly, mentioned photos she had found as a girl in her father's dresser, tucked beside his toy soldiers. Walsh, a U.S. Army sergeant, described the moment. "A beautiful April day. We were zooming like crazy through the middle of Germany. We came across this train, and it was full of Holocaust victims." On April 13, 1945, American soldiers found a stopped train near Magdeburg holding 2,500 Jewish prisoners from Bergen-Belsen. Peter Lantos, then five, was aboard with his mother. He is 86 now, a retired neuroscientist in London. He does not like talking about it. He does it anyway.