holocaust remembrance day

During WWII, my dad's outfit helped liberate a small camp somewhere in the Hartz mtn. area of Germany, near the infamous camps of Nordhausen and Buchenwald. I don't know anything more about it, because although he told me a few bits and pieces about D-Day, and the Battle of the Bulge, and the push through Germany, the camps were the one thing he'd refused to talk about. Please, Daddy, you must at least remember the name of the camp, I'd coax. That's when he'd bury his face behind the newspaper and mumble, Nope. Don't remember. And I knew better than to press any further. (I've tried to find out which one of the camps it was, but apparently the entire area was simply crawling with them; I'll probably never know which one it was.)

He did tell me one thing, when I was working on a paper about the Holocaust for a college course: It was a work camp, not a death camp, he said. But, he added, there wasn't a hell of a lot of difference between them. My dad didn't anger easily (except whenever Ronald Reagan was on TV) but I never saw him angrier that the night we watched an episode of 60 Minutes that featured Neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers. Eisenhower said this would happen, he sputtered. That's why he made them take so many pictures.

After my dad died, I found his own snapshots. And finally understood why he never talked about the camps. Because every time I look at them I, quite literally, feel as though I'm about to vomit. And I wasn't even there. (Somehow, probably because they were taken by my dad, they seem more real to me than the many other Holocaust pictures I've seen.)

So, now that we finally have a printer with a scanner, I can in my own small way honor my father's legacy and be a witness to history, that those who perished, all six million of them, will never be forgotten. May they live forever in our memories and our hearts.

NEVER AGAIN!!!!!