Christine Ottaway: Author: Fascinating research

One of the fascinating things when doing research for a novel are the incredible little nuggets that you dig up that are crying out to be included in your story.

One such occurred when I was researching for Nick North: Cross Wires. Nick and his friend Ashley were taking Nick’s great grandmother and her friend across Nazi occupied Germany at the end of the Second World War. I was trying to work out a realistic route from Ravensbruck, the concentration camp where they were imprisoned, to the approaching Allied armies where they would be rescued. I was debating whether they should go to Leipzig or Magdeburg. For some very good reasons which I cannot now remember, I opted for Magdeburg.

It was whilst I was researching images of Magdeburg at the end of the War to help authenticate my descriptions of the town that I happened upon this extraordinary story that had lain dormant for over 60 years.

Matthew Rozell, a history teacher at small town Hudson Falls in New York state was interviewing Second World War Army veterans about their experiences and quite by chance one Army tank commander told him about how they had liberated a train full of Holocaust survivors in April 1945. One of his fellow liberators had even taken photos.

One of the photos taken of the liberation of the train. It became a famous Holocaust image.

The Nazis had packed 2500 Jews into a train of cattle trucks to send them from Bergen-Belsen to another camp. These were Jews with foreign passports and the Nazis hoped to be able to use them as hostages for prisoner exchanges with the Allies.

However the rapidly advancing American army overran these Nazis who abandoned the train in a siding near Magdeburg. Matthew Rozell posted the account on his oral history school website and there it lay till about 4 years later extraordinary things started happening. Jewish survivors from the train began to contact him and authenticated the story.

Matthew Rozell decided to host a reunion in US between the survivors and their rescuers in 2007 and that was when this story went viral. They even had to temporarily close the school website as it was inundated with hits. Since then they have had ten such reunions. Matthew Rozell has written a book and apparently a film is also to be made.

This was just the sort of extraordinary event that you couldn’t make up but it fitted in perfectly with my Nick North novel.

If you would like to read the original post that got me started on this journey it can be found https://teachinghistorymatters.com or via a Google search at teaching history matters. The book about this incredible event is called A train near Magdeburg by Matthew Rozell.