I never imagined I’d be writing a column about the photos my dad took when American GIs liberated Dachau at the end of World War II, photos too gruesome for my sister and me to see until we were 18.
On the back of each, my dad had written a description of each horrifying scene — mostly of gigantic mounds of corpses — in a frank and somewhat sarcastic tone.
Among other war memorabilia, my dad brought back a huge Nazi banner that must have been flown from one of the buildings in Germany.
Seeing the swastika again in TV coverage of the Charlottesville, Va., riots — carried by neo-Nazis in my own country — jarred me into remembering dad’s graphic photos and reading in his own words, “This stuff would be hard to believe if I hadn’t seen it myself.”
I know a lot of liberals are freaked out right now by the events in Charlottesville — half delighted that they finally got to hook the “alt-right” to the Nazis of our nightmares, half afraid that it doesn’t take much for a few neo-Nazis to become a gang and then a mob or even a militia.
And of course, President Trump didn’t help quell those anxieties by speaking out of both sides of his mouth on this issue. Or should I say, “many sides of his mouth.” His mealy-mouthed equivocation about the evil of Nazis surely would have baffled, if not angered, my lifelong Republican father.
Even when I was young — under that mandatory age of 18 — World War II was ancient history to me and my sister. So I can only imagine that the horrors of the Holocaust, despite determined efforts to make us remember, are even more remote in the minds of young people who seemed to populate the “alt-right” in Charlottesville.
But if a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s some history via Jerome Robacker:
On the back of one of his photos at Dachau, he wrote, “There was a nice smell around here. I didn’t know how many there were dead at the camp but this will give you a slight idea. And there was a long freight train full of dead bodies. And they were stacked in high piles by the furnaces. Just like wood. The furnace was going full blast when we got there. The SS had just pulled out. They cremated them in big urns, and they were burning like wood (in flames). There were 32,000 prisoners (alive) at the camp at the time we arrived there.”
Enough education for one day?
One final note: I happen to have photographs from Dachau. But that Nazi thing is only one part of the “alt-right” people who also worship statues of so-called heroes of the Civil War who, in fact, were not fighting for the glorious Southern way of life. Stripped bare of rhetoric, they were fighting to keep the institution of slavery.
Some readers — probably many — are reading this and thinking I am way off base comparing the atrocities of World War II to the minor skirmishes we are having in America. I get that. And I agree.
But everything starts somewhere.
In 1935, a man named Sinclair Lewis wrote a book called, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Interestingly, the protagonist is a newspaper editor which, as many of you know, I was for many years at The Era until my retirement.
And I’ve just reached a salient point in the book.
The editor, Doremus Jessup, writes, “If a man is going to assume the right to tell several thousand readers what’s what — most agreeable, hitherto — he’s got a kind of what you might say priestly obligation to tell the truth. ‘O, cursed truth.'”
(Marty Wilder is the former managing editor of The Bradford Era.)
