Special thanks, always, to the Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall in Carnegie, PA. That's the title of a talk I gave recently (June 2026) at my local library. I've been to a lot of lectures, presentations, and other similar events about the Holocaust. What I've noticed is that more often than not, all of these are about a narrow subtopic or only about a testimony of either a survivor or their G2 (their kid[s]), sometimes both. Further, unfortunately, there is usually little

Photo by Eric Odinski. I have the incredibly good fortune of calling Sue Tresatti my friend. Her dad, Norman Roth, was from Czechoslovakia. As a teenage boy, he survived persecution, a ghetto, two train rides, a death march, and the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps. Last and only photo of the Roth family, about 1934. Norman is standing in the back center. For most of her life, Sue knew close to nothing about any of this as Norman didn’t talk about it. Her mom told her a couple

I recently gave a talk (February 2026) to a neighboring Rotary club about how to research veterans' records and what to do with that information. It was a great talk, and the feedback was very refreshing as was the interest, from young and old. It also prompted me to finally put info about this here to help others uncover and share these unknown stories. Narrowing down what a specific person did in the war is close to impossible. However, we can get pretty close when we put a

I recently gave a public talk (October 2025) at the Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall about two GIs from Pittsburgh that liberated concentration camps. The families of the two GIs I focused on to tell the story around had only vague knowledge of what their fathers did before I recreated their wartime histories. In the talk, I discussed who those soldiers were before the war, then their induction into the Army and their deployment to France, their experiences in the Infan

That was the high praise I got from a high school kid recently when I gave a talk (November 2025) at the Pittsburgh chapter of the Navy’s Sea Cadets. The talk was about the Navy and World War II. The age of the kids ranged from about 11 to 17. It was a small crowd which I don’t mind at all because that’s always a more intimate discussion and allows for more time during questions and answers afterward. The Navy is not in my wheelhouse, which is half why I jumped at the chanc