SHIPPING DEC. 1, 2026
Some rescues are sudden and dramatic. The remembering takes the rest of your life.
This is the America that showed up at Farsleben, Germany, on April 13, 1945.
The Book
A decade ago, Matthew Rozell told the story of a train near Magdeburg: 2,500 Jewish prisoners, bound for a concentration camp with no name, halted on the tracks and liberated by American soldiers of the 30th Infantry Division in the final days of World War II. A Train Near Magdeburg became the record of that day and the reunions that followed. This is the book about what happened in the decade after the first book A Train Near Magdeburg ended, but also about what never really ends at all.
The story did not stop there.
One Second Before Midnight picks it up from there: new survivors located, a combat medic's forty-year silence finally broken, a Washington Post headline that led to a phone call and a friendship neither party expected. It follows Rozell and filmmaker Mike Edwards across Normandy and Germany, retracing the soldiers' own path from Omaha Beach to the Elbe, and to Israel, where the liberation intersects with a longer history the survivors carry with them still. It closes in February 2026, in a room holding three hundred and twelve descendants of the people this story saved and the people who saved them, most of whom are hearing it for the first time in their lives.
Michael Berenbaum, one of the builders of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, calls the moment of the liberating soldiers’ arrival as "11:59 and 59 seconds in the life of these prisoners." This book is about what happened in the years since, about the 50,000 plus souls alive today because of the soldiers’ actions.
Why Now
A companion documentary, directed by Mike Edwards (The 5 Stones Group), is planned for 2027. This book and the film were built from the same interviews, the same archive, and the same decade of new discovery, giving publication a natural point of convergence with the screen release.