| On April 29, 1945, my father was liberated from the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. In memory of this, I’d like to share an excerpt from my book: Witness For My Father, chapter twenty-one: |
Dachau was the only camp my father would talk about. Even then, he didn’t say much. He told me how he arrived, a shadow of a man weighing less than ninety pounds. He told me about his state of delirium, about the indifference of others. When he described his barrack, he told me only about the dying priest. As I lay in bed, warm under my lofty down comforter, I pictured my father unable to turn in the tight crate amid dirty straw, hearing only the wheezing priest. I hated imagining the starving men, my father close to death.
I wondered how they went on. Their bodies frail, their minds in a state of foggy delirium, beyond exhaustion. Did they think about the people they lost and loved? I’m sure my father did. His mother. His father. His sister. But he couldn’t talk about that. Few could. With his liberation from Dachau, the unthinkable cruelties may have come to an end, but—how could he live past that?
My father wasn’t bitter. He still believed in the good in people. He believed in humanity and did what he could to live his father’s dream and keep hope alive.
Knowing this helped me cope with what happened to him. I’ve always been in awe of my father, of the way that he could overcome his adversity, his young life’s nightmare, and differentiate good from evil. I’m eternally grateful he passed that belief onto me.
It wasn’t just the fact of his liberation that made him refer to April 29th as his “other” birthday. It was how he, completely alone, would restart his life—how and with whom.
