‘Let us not suffer a repeat of such a loss of human dignity’

The April 29 column “Don’t forget, Ukraine’s soil once soaked by Jewish blood“brought back memories of April 1945. As a youthful 97th Division infantry man, my company and I were moving rapidly across Germany and near Flossenburg. We liberated a camp of emaciated prisoners (we dubbed it a horror camp, only later identified as the Flossenburg Concentration Camp).

Compared with some of the larger camps, such as Treblinka, Dachau, and Auschwitz, Flossenburg was a small camp, yet an estimated 24,000 prisoners periodically arrived daily for mass slaughter under the control of Hitler’s Gestapo.

Two prisoners had a lasting impression on me, one so weak he could not raise his head, who told us that he was a Jewish doctor from Budapest, Hungary; all he asked for was a necktie. The other person asked for a bicycle so he could return to his native Yugoslavia. We proceeded to the nearest town and commandeered the requested items.

As our division chaplain, Lt. Col. Leslie Thompson (retired), explained: “The prisoners slept on bare wooden bunks where it was common that people would die of starvation. Near the barracks was a building with stacked bodies awaiting cremation. Nearby was an open cistern full of bits of bone and ash. Later I learned that the Nazis had hung the influential German Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer just before the camp had been liberated.”

Since we were moving quickly through Germany, our unit only stayed a few hours at the camp; we then captured the city of Cheb, Czechoslovakia, which occurred on the last day of the European War, meeting jointly with the Russian Army.

We find ourselves again in dangerous times in a world filled with hate; let us not suffer a repeat of such a loss of human dignity.

Linus B. Losh, Westerville