"What I did in the war" stories; a lot of people haven't. LindaSOG was commenting on the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach, and taking her grandmother there:
My Grandmother lived nearby but never went, and I took her one year. We walked along the Memorial Wall where there are names of people lost to the camps etched into the granite. When we got the end there was blank panels and she looked at me with that look that said, what is this, so I told her, you can put family names here Grandma and she said, Oh, I should put the twins, and then she turns and walks away, leaving me standing there, frozen, unable to move, with that word just banging around in my head. Twins. Twins. What twins?
Now I know she was speaking of her brother’s children, they died in the camps with him and his wife. But it took months to pry that out of her, and she died without telling me his name, or theirs. In fact, she died without telling me her name, upon her death we discovered it was something other than what we though it was.
Such sadness.
Every time some moronic BPM starts screaming about the Israeli 'holocaust' of terrorists and supporters("You put up a fence, you disgusting Jew!", etc.) I remember stories like this. Which cause me to once again tell the Israelis "DON'T STOP. Not until the job is done. Or there will be many, many more stories like this."
4 comments:
I had an uncle who was in the army at the liberation of Buchenwald; he had difficulty keeping his men (he was a master sergeant) from shooting the guards out of hand when they saw what was going on. Most people that yammer about the holocaust have no idea what they are talking about.
In the past 5 weeks I have been doing research on the 'Holocause'. The things I have learned through many books and stories told have just been horrifying. To read the stories or to be told them is bad enough. I cannot fathom going through it in reality, to even know someone who was hit personally with that reality.
And Bob's right. Most people have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to spouting off about it.
God, that is so sad. I understand, but I wish all of the people with these experiences could write them down or something.
My father and two uncles took their War Two experiences with them to their graves. They just couldn't speak of them.
Thanks to color-blindness, a stint as a carpenter's apprentice and a bout with pneumonia in Gulfport Mississippi my Father spent WW2 in Trinidad building barracks to go with an airfield.
My other Uncle made it to Europe in time to serve in the occupation forces thanks to his job turning out precision machined parts for Convair.
I have two cousins (and a Grandfather)who would qualify for VFW membership, but not quite the way VFW planned it.
It's hard to get them to tell stories about bad things that happened, and that is a tragedy. As the late Colonel Cooper said, "If it is worth remembering, write it down!" I would add, "If you want to forget it, write it down, too!"
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