Class project turns film premiere at Gov. DeWine's Holocaust commemoration
Hundreds of guests gathered in the Davidson Theatre at the Riffe Center at 4:30 p.m. May 8 as part of the 44th Annual Governor's Holocaust Commemoration.
At the center of the event was the premiere screening of the first episode of the documentary series “A Train Near Magdeburg," which Columbus filmmaker Mike Edwards has been working on for the past eight years.
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Gov. Mike DeWine, who had hosted a Holocaust-commemoration ceremony at the statehouse earlier in the afternoon, introduced the film briefly before turning the podium over to Edwards.
Acknowledging Edwards, who was a featured speaker at last year's Holocaust commemoration, DeWine said, “I've been excited about seeing this first episode since last year.”
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Edwards, often visibly moved, thanked his many collaborators and said, “For eight years, we have pushed and pushed and pushed to see this through.”
He recalled meeting history teacher Matthew Rozell, whose class assignment to his high school students to talk to their grandparents about their experiences in World War II revealed the astonishing footnote to history that is at the heart of the documentary series.
Retired judge and World War II tank commander Carrol Walsh noted, almost parenthetically during Rozell's interview with him, he and other troops had, during the last months of the war, come upon a seemingly abandoned train in the woods near the town of Magdeburg, Germany, and discovered box cars in which more than two thousand concentration-camp prisoners were being transported.
The German troops in charge of the train, realizing that allied troops were close at hand, had deserted the train, leaving their uniforms and equipment behind.
The deeply affecting first episode of the docuseries sets this singular event in context, providing background on the prisoners on the train, who were in a special section of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp for those intended for “exchange” (the title of this first episode) with German officers held as prisoners of war by the allies.
The episode includes interviews with Walsh and one of his fellow officers, as well as with some of the aging survivors from the train.
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Quietly horrifying without being sensationalistic, the episode relies for much of its power on photographs of victims and survivors of the Holocaust, including a dozen taken by a soldier on the day the train was discovered.
It closes with a cliffhanger as, in 2001, what had been simply a class project on a high school website in upstate New York began getting visitors from around a world − some of whom turned out to be the grown versions of the children on the train.
The filmmakers said they are hoping to finish the final three episodes of the series by the time of next year's Governor's Holocaust Commemoration.
At a glance
For more information about the documentary and the events it records, visit magdeburgtrain.com