When Cincinnati historian Dan Hurley opened a forgotten box of his parents’ wartime letters, he didn’t just uncover family history—he found memories and issues that a whole generation carried and struggled with.
“Maybe they didn’t have an exact purpose except to witness what had happened there.”
-Dan Hurley, on why his father was among the troops sent into Dachau in 1945.
Through more than 720 letters, Hurley traces his father Irwin’s transformation from reluctant soldier, and leader of a quartermaster truck company made up of Black enlisted men, to liberator of Dachau. Dan set out to learn more about his parents’ relationship, and their family’s past. He quickly realized his father’s letters home from Europe also had much to say about the larger events of history through the eyes of an American soldier.
Hurley insists that history must connect past and present to be relevant and urges readers to act with conscience today – to become upstanders.
This episode is part of the Cynthia & Harold Guttman Family Center for Storytelling. Subscribe here https://www.youtube.com/@holocaustandhumanity
Our gratitude to Margaret & Michael Valentine for their ongoing support of this series.
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Episode Resources
Order a copy of Dan’s book
Schedule Dan to be a speaker as part of our Coppel Speakers Bureau and bring this story into your classroom or group
https://www.holocaustandhumanity.org/programs-and-events/book-a-speaker-coppel-speakers-bureau/
Visit us in person in historic Union Terminal or online anytime
https://www.holocaustandhumanity.org/
Learn more about the murder of Booker Spicely, as described in Irwin Hurley’s letter
https://crrj.org/efforts/booker-spicely/
Understand the history of the Dachau concentration camp
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau
Read more on the history of Black troops in Quartermaster companies during the war
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/world-war-ii-black-quartermasters
