Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
Night, Elie Wiesel
My father (602 Tank Destroyer Battalion) was one of the liberators of Ohrdruf / Buchenwald and then Dachau. When I was a child he talked on a G-rated level about his time in the army, the usual recruit training stories, his buddies, his time in England, Normandy, the Bulge, and where he was (Zwickau) when the war in Europe ended but without detailing the horrors. When I returned home from Viet-Nam we did talk about these things. He told me WHAT HE WITNESSED, WHAT HE SAW, WHAT HE SMELLED in the death camps. He said that someday people would deny the reality of the death camps and the genocide against Jews and others. I thought that that he was being pessimistic, that surely the world would never deny what we humans are capable of and that Jews would never again be persecuted.
But he knew.
To our great shame, and to our judgement before God, anti-Semitism is not only tolerated but is now fashionable. Through an obscene moral failing in blaming victims, Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, Charles Coward, and other survivors and witnesses are now accused of lying and their accounts denied. The blood-libel the people Israel is back.
There is much talk of transparency just now, but that is irrelevant if we blithely accept the facile bleatings on the InterGossip and campus beer-parties instead of reading the primary sources left to us, the written and recorded testimonies and the visual records made both by the Nazis, who were proud of their satanic death-cult, and by the liberators.
NIGHT, written shortly after the
liberation in terse, tight, clear, unadorned language is a place to begin.
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