Teaching History Matters

Just back from the reunion of the 30th Infantry Division Veterans of World War II and also the Holocaust survivors whom they liberated on April 13th, 1945.

At the conclusion of my presentation, John, one of the soldiers, said to me, tears in his eyes, “Yes. This is what I fought for. We didn’t really understand why we were over there. This is what we fought for.”

The signature phrase of the United States World War II Memorial in Washington, DC, is that “Americans Came to Liberate, not Conquer.” Yet during their travails across France, the Low Countries, and into Germany itself, many soldiers wondered aloud about the circumstances that took them so far away from home. The drudgery and boredom of Army routine and regulation, not to mention the months of being shot at or shelled, were all taking their toll. However, it slowly became clear to many what they had been fighting for all along as they encountered the evidence of years of Nazi tyranny. And when our soldiers themselves witnessed the atrocities of the greatest crime committed in the history of the mankind, the Holocaust, all questioning ceased.  Americans had indeed come to liberate.

This year, besides the dozen or so old soldiers, we were joined by five Holocaust survivors: Stephen, who at age 31/2 had lost both his parents and was liberated on the train, and Bruria, who told us of how her grandfather passed away shortly after liberation, “beaming like an angel”, content that he had died a free man. George explained the history and the horrors in Bergen Belsen, including losing his father and Micha described his mother’s efforts to recount what had happened in Poland, how his father was shot after jumping from the transport from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, and how he and his mother survived . And Paul explained that how meeting and becoming friends with his actual liberators was helping him to assuage the scars inflicted upon him, so long ago, but really only yesterday.

This is what I fought for.