We must preserve memory

week ago, April 11, was the 74th anniversary of the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by US armed forces during World War 2.

It was Buchenwald, and although described as large by Captain Fred Keffer of the US 9th Armored Infantry Division, it was actually the smallest of the Nazi concentration camps.

You can find Keffer’s full description online, but he begins, “Above the entrance was a German sign that read ‘you get what you deserve’. What we found there scared us more than a hail of machine gun bullets . . . thousands of human skeletons walking around . . . we had never seen such horror . . . not even the horror of war could surpass it.”

The Jewish prisoners, despite their skeletal bodies, were so overwhelmed with joy that they made frantic attempts to lift their liberators into the air, shouting with joy at their survival.

More than 50,000 did not survive; they were used as human “lab rats” to test typhus injections, enduring white phosphorus poured over their bodies, then timed to see how quickly they died. Some of the dead were skinned to make lampshades for the Nazi elite. More than 1,100 were shot in the back of the head, 1,000 Jewish women were sent to the camp whorehouse.

The vast majority just died from overwork in Nazi factories.

Even in a country beset by violent criminal acts, we cannot imagine the horror of World War 2, especially that inflicted on civilian populations, being bombed, fleeing from their homes, shot in the street, and the millions rounded up and condemned to more lingering deaths by being enslaved, tortured and butchered in the concentration camps.

We are so far removed by years from that conflict now that there are very few veterans left, or anyone, who lived through World War 2. The stories and memories we have are all second-hand.

But it is crucial we keep the memory alive, informing ourselves through books and the wealth of information available online.

I grew up having a grandfather who fought in World War 1, and I knew people who fought in World War 2. The generation after me does not even have that connection. Now they know someone who knew someone who fought in the war.

Worse than that is coming across young people absolutely ignorant about the war and the Holocaust that went along with it.

We all need to be custodians of history, passing on knowledge to the next generation so that we all take up the Holocaust memorial mantra, “Never again”.

A