Liberation 1945

  • Published
  • By 2nd Lt. Les Hernandez
  • 71st Medical Support Squadron
VANCE AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. --  The horror of World War II, particularly the Holocaust and the events leading up to it, cannot be overstated.

The death tolls are staggering, and the manners of death are confounding to the civilized mind. People were forced to dig their own graves. Thousands died in death marches, and children starved on the street in segregated ghettos.

To relegate these grainy, black and white images to cable television and dismiss this suffering is to reject history itself.

Genocide did not end with the liberation of concentration camps in 1945. We have faced it in our own lifetimes in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. That is why we must remember.

Holocaust Remembrance Day begins the evening of April 15 and ends the evening of April 16. 

The dual purpose of Days of Remembrance is to honor the victims of the Holocaust and celebrate the heroism of liberators.

Soviet soldiers were the first liberators, overtaking the Majdanek camp in Poland July 23, 1944. On April 11, 1945, American soldiers liberated 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald in Germany, and subsequently liberated Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenburg, Dachau, and Mauthausen.

Kenneth Colvin was an American soldier of Jewish ancestry and was among the Americans who liberated many of the well-known concentration camps and lesser-known, often nameless, labor camps.

In the course of telling his story, Colvin recounted meeting an English-speaking prisoner named Niso at Ebensee. Upon learning that the two had common acquaintances in California they grew close.

Eventually, Mr. Colvin asked Niso, whose English was a bit broken, to write a testimonial.

Much of the account is familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of World War II, though this in no way diminishes the barbarity. He spoke of cattle cars in which, for lack of options, he and others that survived were forced to sit upon the corpses of their fallen brothers.

He also spoke of the arrival of the Americans.

"But when the Americans came, it was a nice day," said Colvin, according to www.tellingstories.org. "What they did for us you know better than everybody else. But, what they did for me was simply astonishing. They made a live man out of a dead man."

The recurring theme of Holocaust survivors is hope.

This is a timeless quality for mankind, to hope when there is no justification for it. Hope sustains when there is no sustenance.

As we commemorate these Days of Remembrance let us hope that if we are ever again witnesses to inhumanity, we have the courage to confront it.