My Dad's Scrapbook: Buchenwald

When I was a child, I was pawing through our big box of photos, usually kept in the attic, when I came across a group of photos I couldn't make sense of. More than anything, they looked like pictures of piles of rags, and I ran to my dad, saying, "Daddy, what is this?" He scooped them away from me, saying, "When you are older, I will tell you about them."

Later came when I was in fifth grade, working on my class scrapbook of "Current Events," clipping with horror the stories on the Eichmann trials. About that time I was also reading, The Diary of Anne Frank, so Dad must have felt the time had come, and he told me about what he witnessed in the camps at the end of the war. 

I know many men did not talk about their war experiences, but my dad did.  When so many didn't, I am not sure why he did, but I can think of some reasons. He returned to live with his very loving parents, and he returned about the same time as his brother Les who survived many horrendous battles on land, including the Battle of the Bulge. Throughout the years, his crew got together and the men stayed up late while the wives and kids went to bed, and they talked long into the night

When I was teaching College Writing I at The University of Findlay, I created a course titled "Writing About World War Two from a Personal Point of View." I had the students interview someone who was alive then. We read Terkel, we studied aspects of the war still impacting our lives, like the Demjamjuk. He spoke to my students and to my siblings' friends who were writing essays and making videos about the war. 

Here is his from the scrapbook is his account, and one of those photos I came across as a child.:

When we went to the concentration camps to evacuate them, that was mind boggling. I was just a kid—I wasn’t twenty-one when I got out. I’d been through the war and ah—you know you take a kid at that age now and dump him into that sort of thing and they’d have the screamin’ meemee’s.

When we flew into Buchenwald—you could smell it in the airplane from let’s just say…miles away. You could smell decomposed flesh—just stunk to the high heavens. When they knew the Allies were coming, the Germans just ran—what they didn’t kill, they just left there: no food, no supplies. . .  And [the prisoners] were afraid to leave—they didn’t know the war was over. You had to see them to…it’s mind boggling.

The first time I walked down a street in Buchenwald and I saw a trench, oh, I would say, five hundred feet long, that they had shoved out with a bulldozer, with bodies in it. I mean sixteen deep in the ditch. Dumped back in there with dump trucks and then they’d dump lime in on [the bodies]. And they started draggin’  them out instead of leavin’ them in there. And I mean, when we went in there, I mean there were bodies every place you looked—decomposed bodies.

And the people that were still alive—they were like skeletons—just bones with skin stretched over them. It was—it was a traumatic experience really. I mean I had nightmares over that for a long time.