Local students among first to watch film on remarkable WWII story

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — As the video played and few dozen Bishop Kearney students watched, Sharon Salluzzo thought about her dad.

It was his story that started all this.

He had been a soldier on his way to battle in World War Two when he and other GIs found train cars packed with Nazi captives.

They did what they say they had to and saved them.

“Here were soldiers in the midst of battle. They were given orders and they stopped their orders to save these 2,500 emaciated, very sick people and that’s not something that everybody would do,” Salluzzo said.

A story untold until Salluzzo, who lives in the Rochester area, got it into the hands of filmmaker Mike Edwards a decade ago.

The ultimate goal has been to get it into schools so more kids will learn about the Holocaust and its lessons.

“My message is, you can be a liberator too,” Edwards said. “Maybe these kids might not have as severe a situation as what’s depicted in this film, but they will have choices to make on whether to help somebody or to not discriminate against somebody because they’re different than them.”

As the great-grandson of a World War Two veteran, Jack Krutell, a senior at Bishop Kearney, says the film made him feel part of a bigger story.

“It’s just how little actions affect others,” Krutell said. “Those soldiers, they didn’t know they’d be able to help that many people and it really goes to show there’s a butterfly effect, something as little as that and it ends up being something as large as this and historically that can be show in a lot of ways.”

A lesson from the past for the present.

The film, which is titled ‘A Train Near Magdeburg’, will be shown Friday at 1 pm at The Little Theatre .

Edwards says the audience will watch episode one of a four-part series, a good portion of which is still being put together.

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