-Alice Barrett
“On April 4, 1945, United States Army units from the 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitler’s Germany.
These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity: railroad cars stacked with emaciated, lifeless bodies; ovens full of incinerated human remains; warehouses filled with stolen shoes, clothes, luggage, and even eyeglasses; prison yards littered with implements of torture and dead bodies; and―perhaps most disturbing of all―the half-dead survivors of the camps. For the American soldiers of all ranks who witnessed such powerful evidence of Nazi crimes, the experience was life altering. Almost all were haunted for the rest of their lives by what they had seen, horrified that humans from ostensibly civilized societies were capable of such crimes.”
—Hell Before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945 by John C. McManus
After 1945, the revelation of the mass killing of Jewish people slowly emerged in horrific photographs, one after the other, in newspapers.
Gentiles were shocked and stunned. Jews, after centuries of Christian hatred, perhaps not as stunned. To what other end does hatred lead?
Politicians who hint and imply racist tropes, just enough to be deniable, insinuate that a Trump presidency will not be as bad as he himself makes it sound.
The Holocaust of Jewish people came to an official end in1945, just four years before I was born. My dad and uncles fought against fascism.
Yet anti-semitism did not end. The memory of what those soldiers experience on seeing victims of anti-semitism may fade, but we cannot forget the lessons of hate.
Reactions against the Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza and the West Bank are righteous. Anti-semitism is not. Politicians, columnists blur the edges. Be alert.
Holocaust: never again.
Mass bombing civilians: never again.
Dorothy Today 