V.E. DAY

Around the world, we are celebrating VE Day. Currently, in the US, they're running the TV miniseries "War and Remembrance" (a $100,000,000 production that some said was more expensive than the war itself). I had read the reviews and the comments in various newsgroups about it when the series first came out. There are those who have said that the production seemed overly dramatic, that the scenes at the death camp went on too long, that Hitler seemed a caricature.

One of the things I learned studying history was the importance of primary sources - sources or people who were actually there. My primary source about the war was my father, who was a staff sergeant when the Allies liberated the death camps. He rarely volunteered information, but when I did asked, he would tell me. He liberated Dachau, and left me polaroid pictures taken during the liberation. I still have the pictures of those who survived, who looked like skeletons. I also have pictures of the skeletons of those who did not survive, of the open boxcars with bodies piled high.

My father had seen a lot of action during the war and later was in charge of three P.O.W. camps for German prisoners, but nothing prepared him for what he saw. He said that he watched his commanders loose it when they saw the camps. Those who were liberated were like the dead, they could not believe that they were finally being freed.

These gruesome images must never be forgotten. It must never be forgotten what barbarism that man is capable of committing toward fellow men. But some may say, "I don't want to think about it, surely no one believes that these atrocities were justified, that they'd every be repeated." But only a couple of years ago, while I was on University Staff some organization asked to use University of California conference grounds property for a meeting. This request was later denied when it was learned that the organization requesting the facilities believed that the Holocaust was a hoax, that it did not really occur. There was also a corresponding outcry that this organizations' free speech rights were being violated.

A person who remembers the past can be grateful for the freedoms that were purchased at great cost by those who went before. They can memorialize those who fought and died, they can honor those against whom horrors were committed. A person without this sense of history is a severed person, self-referential, cut off from the past.

"Lest we forget" Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian