Pasayten's Methow Valley Bulletin Board

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That was hard to watch.

One of my older Aunts was married a Jew who carried the numbers - from some camp - tattooed on his forearm. He must have been a young man during that era; I cant even imagine what he had to in order to survive.

We kids used to stare his tattoo.

One of the last lines of the program? “Evil comes…step by step”
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VERY SERIOUS stuff, to be remembered and known accurately. But now ‘Hitler and Nazi’ are thrown around willy nilly just to score cheap political points and smear anyone who doesn’t tow some often crazy political and ideological narratives. I hope your REAL history breaks through here and has some impact, I’m afraid this BB is hopelessly lost to nonsense.

I came of age in a country where many of our best writers and thinkers were grappling with the questions: What is totalitarianism? Why will it not happen here? What is the difference between our open society and `theirs`?

My father-in-law had been the doctor in a small farming town, and most of his stories were about doctoring. After he passed, my wife and I were cleaning out the attic of his lake cabin when we found a shoe box full of back-and-white photos from his time in Europe with the US Army.

As a young med school graduate, he was was part of a mobile surgical hospital attached to Patton`s army as they sped through France and Germany. His team had been billeted for a few days in an old castle (it was probably just a manor, but impressive, if you are from the Midwest) doing what young men do with time on their hands. A jeep showed up, in a hurry. ‘Pack up’, said an officer, ‘Everything. General`s orders’.

They thought they would be treating 3rd Army casualties, but after a night`s drive, they ended at a broken gate. Patton was long gone, but two young GI`s from his army guarded the gate. ‘You don`t want to go in there,’ they said, ‘we got orders not to let anyone in or out’. You could smell the place from miles away. It was called Buchenwald. The ovens were still warm. The corpses were stacked like cord wood. Those were the pictures in my father-in-law’s box in the attic. ‘We got our orders from the General,’ said the officer, ` ‘Save who can be saved’ .

An anecdote: I don`t know if it was at Buchenwald (apparently, there were over 100 labor or death camps throughout that part of Europe, for ‘Enemies of the State’ ). Patton was on his way into Germany, but he left word with the Supreme Command that ‘You have to see this’. After a tour of the ovens and the mass graves, the staff assembled in a camp office. In the tension and silence, a jeep driver stumbled against a file cabinet and apologized. Eisenhower said `Soldier, you may not know what you are fighting for, but now you know what you are fighting against.’

Imagine being at the gate that night. These were not philosophers or idealists. They were average Americans, garage station mechanics and cashiers and a kid from the Midwest. There was no preparation, no counseling, before or after. Undoubtedly, they were capable of injustice, but I doubt they were capable of what they witnessed. Maybe that is a difference between totalitarianism and an open society.

My wife donated the pictures to the Holocaust Museum in DC. She had an appointment with an archivist. They filed them, but didn’t really learn anything new. We went through about half of the museum. It was pretty grim. You can only look at so many photos of emaciated faces, so many piles of shoes and spectacles and luggage.

That weekend in DC was the anniversary of the Museum. They set up a big tent, hundreds of people. In the front were victims of the camps and some of the veterans who liberated them. There weren’t many left. I saw a quote from Eisenhower engraved on a brick wall outside. I don’t remember the exact quote, but it basically said :’Remember this. Collect the evidence. There will come a time when people will deny it ever happened.’

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What looks to be an interesting PBS program coming up - next Tuesday, the 22nd.

https://video.ksps.org/video/preview-si ... on-gsxdie/

Simon Schama - a History prof @ Columbia University - is a highly regarded, and prolific, British author; well know for his work on the holocaust and European and Jewish history.
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