V-E Day

Himmler at Mauthausen — Well fed and rested, and without the customary enormous block of stone and the jibes and rifle butts of the prison guards, the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, walks during an April 1941 visit from the granite quarry up the notorious “staircase of death” toward the camp proper at KZ-Mauthausen.
(Click to enlarge.)

Amid all the bustle and pressing business and weekend plans of a typical Friday, I hope that people will take at least a moment to realize that today marks the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.

I can’t do the significance of that event, or of the conflict itself, even the remotest justice — and I need to get a car into the dealership for an oil change in just a minute. (The daily trivial necessities that interfere with reflection, daily.) So I won’t even try.

But the Second World War, with its attendant horrors, killed scores of millions of people. It changed the world. It gave us, forever, a potent image of the most extreme human evil conceivable. It brought out the best and the worst in many people who had no idea what they had in themselves. (I wonder, constantly, when reading about moral and physical heroism during the war and in the extermination camps: Could I, would I, have done that? And I honestly don’t know. I hope so, but I don’t know. And I thank the Lord, literally, that I haven’t been called upon to find out.)

It left an indelible mark upon my father, for one. And he was very far from alone.

My father served as a sergeant in General Patton’s Third Army, as a member, for the final period of his years in the military, of the Eleventh Armored Division. His unit, as I’ve mentioned multiple times before, participated in the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, and of the adjacent satellite camp at Gusen. He was there, right in the appalling thick of it.

My father was concerned, from time to time, that the sacrifice of his generation would be forgotten, and he was horrified at the thought that possibly shallow subsequent generations might give it no thought and might fail to remember the horrors of the Final Solution, which he saw at first hand and never forgot.

So, in tribute to him and to the many others, now mostly moved on, who fought for the right in the vast struggle, I ask myself and others not to forget.

Never forget.