International Holocaust Memorial Day today: 80 yrs. since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp (worin Arbeit wird freimachen) by Soviet soldiers. That was in January 1945; in April of that year, the British liberated Buchenwald, and Life magazine soon thereafter published a story accompanied by this photo by Margaret Bourke-White, the story and photo that thrust upon me, at the age of 4½, the knowledge of evil, and with it, the understanding that such evil could fall upon me, that something like this could happen to me (and I can’t go back to that moment without weeping hot tears):
“Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945” (photo: Margaret Bourke-White / Life Picture Collection / Shutterstock)
Yes, I could read enough of the story to understand the horror of the concentration camps; I learned to read when I was 3, and when I entered the first grade in September 1946 (having just reached the age of 6) I was reading at the 5th grade level. But I had a lot to learn about the ways of the world, and the Holocaust was a bitter lesson; how could anyone do such things?
My parents didn’t attempt to shield me from the knowledge — their general principle was that it was better to know things than to fall into harm through ignorance or to fantasize even more monstrous worlds. They held me and kissed me and promised to protect me and assured me that this particular evil had passed. And they let me talk through my fears. All of which was indeed calming.
Soon I was giving up some of my little allowance, and collecting bits of money any way I could, to send small amounts to a charity for starving children in China and one for child victims in Armenia.
My parents were not churchgoers, and I don’t think either of them ever quoted scripture, but they got me a KJV Bible as a birthday present, and in it I found many things, most strikingly for this day’s occasion, the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:40:
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
And I tried to take that to heart.
As for the photo, as Life said, about some other war photos:
Dead men will have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them
Look at them.
