Over a half-million readers.  Groundbreaking World War II and Holocaust narrative history.

Normandy American Cemetery, Spring 2022. Photo by Mike Edwards.

 

And it is all TRUE, as told in our veterans’ and survivors’ own words, intimately, just you and the speaker at a kitchen table over a cup of coffee, tea, or a bottle of beer.

I was born sixteen years after the killing stopped, and the day is fast approaching when NO ONE with firsthand memory of World War II will be alive.

Most will have gone the way of the World War I and Civil War generation without ever having told the tale outside of their own brothers and sisters who experienced it with them. So, thank you for reading my books; they are the culmination of a mission that for me turns out to have been lifelong. If you actually read them to the end, you will have done something important—you will have remembered a person who may be now long dead, a veteran who may have lived out his or her final days wondering if it was all worth it.

You probably won’t find my books on the New York Times Bestsellers List, because I never shopped them to Big Publishers in the hopes of fortune and fame; I was too busy teaching history to our young people.

I walked the talk.

I’m not a professional historian, though at one time I was on that track; I was just an ordinary schoolteacher who recognized the extraordinary achievements of the witnesses and survivors of the most tumultuous period in the annals of mankind. And these people were our teachers and coaches, shopkeepers and carpenters, millworkers and mechanics, nurses and stenographers, lawyers and loggers, draftsmen and doctors, people from every walk of life, grade school dropouts and college graduates. 

They were the World War II generation, and there was a time when sixteen million of them were in uniform.

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 As a teacher of history, I felt a responsibility to make what for many kids was the dullest subject come to life.

Photo: Matthew Rozell addresses students, with Pacific Marines at the ready to tell their stories, 1990s.

So early in my career, I took it upon myself to devote more than the ‘suggested’ hour or two for the study of World War II in the classroom.

It culminated in conversations that we had a hand in coaxing out of the generation that saved the world for us. Over the years I became well-versed in the story of World War II, to be better able to understand our interviewees’ stories in the proper context, and to become an expert guide for our young people. Eventually, it was time to parse out the stories for the world in a fashion that made sense, because when one really delves into it, the history of World War II can be so overwhelming as to be staggering. In my talks on trying to grasp the magnitude of the Holocaust, I’ve likened it to entering a room with a dozen doors. Open one, and you find yourself in another room, with another dozen doors to enter. It takes a bit of skill to hold the attention of a teenager, and now, I put those skills to work in my books for you, too. We will navigate these veterans' own words, together.

And I entered through one of those incredible doorways, which turned out to be a portal to the past when I investigated a long-forgotten incident of World War II and the Holocaust that culminated in the re-uniting of some 275 survivors of a Nazi death train with the actual American soldiers who liberated them from it, in one of the most dramatic photos taken in the 20th century.

It is an amazing story, and like all my books, my job as an interviewer and an author is to help these men and women open that door just a crack for us, just to get a glimpse of what they did that would shape our world to come.

I know you will enjoy my books—they make thoughtful and enlightening gifts as well—and I know you will be back for more. Because my books HEAL THE WORLD, in a spiritual and literal fashion. (And if you have read this far, by golly, add code RDBIO at checkout for an additional discount.)

God Bless,

Matthew Rozell

MATTHEW ROZELL is an award-winning history teacher, author, blogger and speaker. He has been featured as the ABC World News ‘Person of the Week’ and has had his work filmed for CBS News, NBC Learn, the Israeli Broadcast Authority, the New York State United Teachers, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Most recently, he was the recipient of the New York State Education Department's Yavner Teaching Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching the Holocaust and Human Rights. He also led archeological excavations at formative military sites relative to the birth of our nation for many years, which will be detailed in an upcoming book.