My father never tried to discuss his military service with his children. Nor did he ever condemn or condone my status as a conscientious objector. Though I think he was proud to have served, he didn’t think any special virtue should be ascribed to him because he did. I feel similarly about being a conscientious objector. On Veterans’ Day then I do not honor, but I do remember, and I am thankful. I tell myself the following story. There was celebration when the 30,000 prisoners remaining in the main Dachau camp raised their voices to greet their liberators, but there have been few if any celebrations since then. Instead I remember, even though I was not there.
The concentration camps were all closed by the time I was born, but I have known about them since I was a teenager. My knowledge came from a spiral-bound book of photographs of the Dachau camp taken the day after liberation that I found in a drawer of seldom worn clothes in my parents’ bedroom. Seeing the tattoos on the dead bodies in some of the photos helped me make sense of an incident with my parents that had happened several years before. In the spring of my third grade year, a bubble gum company put stick-on tattoos in their bubble gum packs. I found out about them at school and purchased a couple packs from the corner store as soon as I could. When my parents saw the tattoo on my arm, they became very upset. I explained the tattoo would wash off in a few days, but that was irrelevent to my parents. While Mom explained that tattoos were only worn by low class people, Dad was very emotional. He was angry with me to be sure, but he was also hurt and sad and concerned as if a grave threat had come over his family. He said tattoos were evil and he never wanted them to threaten his family again. There was no punishment for me except to scrub off the tattoo right away. I promised to never play with bubble gum tattoos again and that I would certainly never get a real tattoo. Only as I write this do I realize that my tattoo incident was close to the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, and Dad had remembered the tattoos of both the living and the dead.
Dad talked very little about his experiences in World War II. I can only remember two stories that he told to any of this children though he told more to our mother that she shared with me after his death. Both these stories came 25 years after the war. After they watched the movie Patton, he told my brother that he knew Patton and that he was certainly nothing like what the movie had portrayed. George Patton was loved by the men who served with him. The other story happened in his discussion with my wife about calories after she had given birth to our first child (his first grandchild). She had read that 1200 calories was the minimum necessary to maintain health. Dad said he once thought that too, but in caring for people at the end of the war he found that people that had been starved could only take 900 calories until their digestive systems got used to eating again. At the time I don’t think I took my father’s comment as a war story as much as I was surprized that my father had studied nutrition.
Dad died 30 years after the end of the war after a seven month fight against colon cancer. This set off a cascade of changes in my life that included returning to church after an 8 year absence, starting a doctoral program in pathology, reading books about the Holocaust, and having more frequent conversations with Mom, especially about what happened with her and Dad during the war years. I think I read at least two books on the Holocaust; one of the most significant books of my life was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I also remember reading several books by Hannah Arendt and Thomas Merton at the time and thinking that it should be a requirement of world citizenship to read at least one book about death, violence, and the Holocaust. Two decades later I watched Schindler’s List; I could not watch it again. I started to read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste 2 years ago but could not finish it.
Over those two decades in conversations with Mom, I found out some of Dad’s activities during the war years and some of hers. They were married in October of 1943, and while many troops were being sent to Great Britain for the Normandy invasion just after this time, my father was not. He was sent to another fort to help train more troops and to get some training in logistics for himself. It wasn’t until over a year after their wedding that he received his orders to leave from New York. He wasn’t feeling very well when he left and felt even worse when he got to Le Havre, France. His first two weeks in France were spent in a field hospital recovering from pnemonia. Some time after this he became attached to General Patton’s staff as the Third Army moved across Europe. Mom said she never found out much about her husband’s activities between Le Havre and Dachau except that he installed a special door in Patton’s tent for the general’s dog. When I asked her how the book of Dachau photos came into our house, she told me the story that Dad had told her. She said that General Patton was going to take military photographers around the main Dachau camp to document the atrocities but that he got so nauseated from the many dead that had yet to be buried that he couldn’t go into the camp. The task fell to my father. When movie cameras came to do another tour of the camp a few days later, many of the dead bodies had been buried, and the general had recovered. His tour of the camp is the introductory exhibit in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The book of photos were Dad’s remembrance of the day. She thought the photos might have been used as evidence in the Nuremburg trials, but she didn’t know. She also said that Dad had been involved in setting up housing for the judges, lawyers, and witnesses involved in the trials, but when the trials started, Dad was already home. I remembered Dad’s comments about the calories needed for survival. Mom said that he probably spent several weeks caring for survivors. 30,000 prisoners were freed from the main camp at Dachau and more than that number from the satellite camps in the area. And Mom finally said that she had burned the book of Dachau photos right after Dad died. This was a strange act for a librarian, but she always hated those photos.
After Mom passed away in 2013, I found photos of Dad in various places in Germany in the months after the war, including a couple of photos of Patton. But I didn’t think much about the camp at Dachau until several years later when I was writing a book of and about the Psalms. My thought was that even though on Good Friday we read the words from Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me,” we really are not able to dwell there in all the suffering of that moment. Our cognitive selves usually skip to Easter rather that look at the suffering of Good Friday. “He died for my sins,” is not so much wrong but incomplete and mechanical, like trying to reason our way out of suffering. The suffering continues in Psalm 22, “I am cast out, utterly alone … a worm, not human, scorned and despised, denied, reviled with cynical laughter…there is no help…wild bulls surround…I am poured out…my heart melts like wax…I am cast off and encircled by the violent…vicious dogs snap at my feet…for my clothing they cast lots.” The suffering is not so much vanquished by reason as borne by experience. This is true whether the suffering is that of Job or the cross or the prisoners in the concentration camps. What we find in the rest of Psalm 22 is continuing the conversation with God, even as the statements in the psalm grow more positive we have no word that the suffering is gone. “Be not far from me…save me from the lion mouths…I will praise you…may your heart live forever… you alone light the soul.” The “answer” to suffering is within the experience. Job’s comforters tried to give him reasons yet he found his answer in continuing his conversation with God. On the cross Jesus continues his conversation with his Father. As Viktor Frankl said, those in the camps who found meaning were the ones able to continue their internal conversations. I believe also that during Dad’s walk among the living and the dead through the hell that was Dachau continued his own conversation with God.
On the gate of the Dachau camp (as well as most or all of the other German concentration camps) were the words that work will make you free. I wanted to write the words from my haiku from Psalm 22 that would contrast the truth of the Psalm with the lie of the words on the gate. To find an image I did a Google search for “Dachau gate.” There were many images of gate though none with enough white space to write my haiku. Then I came to an image I hadn’t expected. I was both amazed and horrified. (In previous versions of this story that photo was included here, but I now find that unnecessary.)
Next to a pile of dead bodies in Dachau were two American soldiers. One was standing with his hands in his back pockets with a long thumb on his left hip, to me a familiar pose. He wore a Red Cross armband, and there were captain’s bars on his shoulder. He was partly turned away from the camera so that his profile was not quite complete, but I knew that this was my dad on his journey with the photographers through the camp.
What should we remember? What should the world remember about this liberation? Most of the survivors are now dead as are most of the liberators. The societal message could be something like, “Never again.” And even beyond that when we even begin to divide ourselves into us and them, we begin to head down a road that has lead us before to Dachau and all the horrors of the concentration camps. For myself I also remember that wherever I am, and especially when I suffer, God is present with me.
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