Roll Call, 9 March 2010: We must never forget. It is the creed of the survivors who braved unspeakable horrors at the hands of the Nazis. The brave Allied soldiers who battled to free them share it, too. But the reality is, as time moves forward, fewer and fewer firsthand voices remain. As they go, so go the memories. It is for this reason that author Michael Hirsh sought to document for posterity the stories of the American heroes who swept across Europe in the waning days of World War II in order to free thousands upon thousands of Jews and others marked for death.

The Liberators: America’s Witnesses to the Holocaust is Hirsh’s homage to these GIs, and it is a fine and necessary addition to the lexicon of Holocaust literature. A compilation of 150 interviews with aged veterans, the book chronicles — in paragraphs and sometimes pages of the soldiers’ own words — the Americans’ inexorable march from the beaches of France in 1945 through Axis-controlled Germany and Austria to liberate the brutal Nazi death camps. But the book is not simply an aloof account the liberation. It is a powerful and emotional telling of the trials these soldiers faced.

As testament to the horrendous cruelty of Adolf Hitler’s death machine, war-hardened soldiers, fresh from the battlefields, were overwhelmed by the breadth of inhumanity they witnessed in the concentration camps. It is a testament to the fragility of the human psyche that these sights haunted the soldiers for the rest of their lives. . . .

~~~~~
The Importance of Knowing History