In December, 2025, the Department of History welcomed alumnus Ed Kruszynski (’84) for a powerful public lecture and book talk on his two works, The Medic’s Wife and Unbreakable. Throughout the talk, he invited our students and members of the community to see World War II not only through battle lines, but through the intimate lens of a family archive—what he called a “time machine” into the 1940s.

The inspiration for Kruszynski’s book The Medic’s Wife began in the aftermath of a 2006 flood that ravaged his mother’s home. From a waterlogged box emerged his father’s wartime journals and photographs—fragile artifacts that opened a vivid window into the “indescribable horror” and resilient love that defined the era. Centering the often-overlooked role of combat medics, he traced his father’s path through the Battle of the Bulge in Bastogne and to Buchenwald on April 17, 1945, a moment that forever shaped his understanding of service and survival.

One of the evening’s most moving threads was the silence that followed the war. “My mother and father didn’t talk about the war at all… they just don’t want to relive those experiences,” Kruszynski shared, echoing a familiar truth among veterans. That silence, however, was broken by research that connected his family’s story to Raphael Kantor, a Holocaust survivor. Their fathers were at Buchenwald at the same time—one as a medic and liberator, the other as a prisoner—an extraordinary intersection discovered decades later.

For students and scholars alike, Kruszynski framed history as a “detective story,” one that asks us to preserve the letters, photographs, and memories that carry the “best and worst parts of humanity” forward. His talk was a reminder that archives—however humble—can reshape how we teach, learn, and remember.