Dad didn't talk about the war. We, his children, all knew he'd served, but the specifics were unknown to us, and it never occurred to us to ask. What had he seen, what had he done? Not until after his death did the questions seem to matter. Mom knew he'd been involved in the liberation of a concentration camp, but she never even knew which one.
His service records had been destroyed in a fire, but we knew he'd been a truck driver. Eventually, we were able to track down the unit he was attached to--the 42nd Infantry Division, the Rainbow Division. So then we knew. Dachau.
Dachau was the Nazi's first extermination camp, an efficiently functioning death machine that served as a model for all the rest. It was also only the second camp liberated by Allied forces. The soldiers of the rainbow Division had no idea that such camps existed, and when they stumbled across it, were so overwhelmed by what they saw that some of them began to open fire on the camp overseers even as they tried to surrender.
Whether Dad knew about that, I'll never know. Like many of his generation, he wasn't given to talking about his feelings; he just sucked it up and went on about his business. Maybe if he had talked, if more of the soldiers involved in the liberation had talked, if more voices had been heard, it would be harder to deny the Holocaust.
Ah, but why is such testimony even necessary? We have the transcripts of the Wannasee Conference, the plans for the Final Solution in black and white. We have the testimony of the people who carried out the crimes, film footage, mass graves. We have numbers and names and all the evidence anyone could possibly need. There is nothing to prove. It happened!
And yet, this week Iran was host to an international panel of Holocaust deniers, for whom stories of the camps and genocide are merely products of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Oh, some of them will concede, the camps existed, but they weren't primarily death camps. And yeah, people died, but not in such huge numbers.
The camp records at Dachau--kept, after all, by the people who ran it--list 130, ooo people deliberately killed at the camp. The actual number of those who died there was much larger, killed by rampant disease, but the Nazis only considered those they killed personally to be significant. So let's go with their number--130,ooo. Multiply that by the number of camps--by the most conservative count, you're talking deaths in the millions.
You would think, in the information age, it would be harder to be ignorant. Facts are facts, right. But it's human nature to ignore facts, to see what you want to see. Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur--as long as we refuse to call wholesale, ethnically motivated slaughter "genocide", it can be something else. As long as we choose to believe the president is sincerely motivated by concerns over weapons of mass destruction, we can sanction war on a non-aggressor nation. As long as we don't see it, as long as it doesn't involve us personally, we can tolerate anything.
As long as we're human, we can deny our humanity.
