I spoke in several communities in New Jersey and New York for Yom Hashoah, the day of remembering the victims of the Holocaust -- or the Shoah, which in Hebrew means utter destruction. My talk differed from the usual Yom Hashoah focus. Since the day was inaugurated in 1951, communities worldwide have typically observed the day with public readings of the names of the victims, talks by survivors and prayers. When ceremonies have included World War II veterans who helped to liberate the Nazi concentration camps, it has been to reunite them with survivors of the camps they liberated. My talk conveyed a new perspective: that we have been limited and short-sighted in our view of who the victims of the Holocaust have been. Through the trauma of the GI liberators, the Holocaust came to American shores and infected not just the families of those liberators but American culture as a whole.
First, it is time to recognize, honor and address the trauma of the liberators. These men and women have spent the past 66 years locking away their vast anguish and denying their grief, because they have deemed their trauma insignificant in comparison to that of the survivors. And they went silent, because in 1945 no one at home wanted to hear the horrors the liberators witnessed or the new dimension of evil the Nazis created.
In fact, all World War II veterans went silent, doing their best to lock away their trauma, as society had little capacity to acknowledge it, let alone treat it. The Veteran Administration's main treatment of severe psychological anguish in the late 1940s was to perform lobotomies on the veteran. Many veterans turned to alcohol to numb their pain or to work to keep their minds busy. (Aaron Glantz of The San Francisco Chronicle has reported on a deeply disturbing high suicide rate among World War II vets.)
Like most other children of World War II veterans, I took my father's war service for granted (what little I knew about it was that he had been a part of the landing on Utah Beach on D-Day and had participated in the Battle of the Bulge), never considering that it might have any relationship to his silent detachment, depression and melancholy, or to my mother's alcoholism and subsequent disappearance from our lives. Only after his death, when I found photographs that he had taken during the war that revealed he had been among the liberators of Nordhausen, did I begin to wonder if the war might explain his enigmatic personality and our family's dysfunction.
Because I could not find a single book about the emotional consequences of liberating the camps or about the trauma of World War II veterans, I traveled around the country in 2005 to talk with liberators. Of the 82 men and one woman I interviewed, all but four remained in the grip of trauma, manifesting melancholy and intense discomfort, and describing flashbacks, nightmares and panic attacks. Most could not bring themselves to describe what they witnessed behind the gates of the camps.
The children of these veterans who knew that their fathers had witnessed the Holocaust learned where their fathers had been from discovering their photographs. Very few of the veterans have shared the memory with their children, who, like me, grew up in emotionally repressed homes where alcoholism or workaholism were often present. We children have struggled with depression and attenuated relationships with our parents and siblings.
When General Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf and witnessed the burned bodies, the piles of bodies, the massacred, he said to the troops present, "You may not have known what you have been fighting for, but you now know what you have been fighting against." Anticipating that one day some people would try to deny the Holocaust, Eisenhower ordered every American soldier in the area who was not on the front lines to visit Ohrdruf and Buchenwald.
I have yet to find any formal accounting of how many GIs witnessed a camp. But given that Buchenwald alone was a system of 180 camps; that after the Berlin Wall fell and we gained access to Nazi archives in the eastern half of Germany, we learned that the Nazis had over 20,000 camps scattered across Europe; and that 35 divisions were involved in either liberating the camps, burying victims, treating and relocating survivors, then at least 300,000 GIs witnessed the Holocaust. In the midst of interviewing veteran liberators, one told me, "I have struggled to stay alive every day since." Those words conveyed on a physical, irrefutable level that not only had my father been a victim of the Holocaust, but so had my mother, my brothers and I. Through the American GIs, the Holocaust found its way to American shores and infected an entire generation with emotional numbness and insecurity.
Genocide creates endless ripples of destruction. War creates an endless aftermath of anguish and devastation. All participants are casualties, and through them, so, too, are their families.
After 66 years, veteran liberators such as Nat Futterman of New Rochelle, N.Y. is ready to tell his story. May we listen. And learn.
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Carol W. Berman, M.D.: Do You Ever Feel Like You're Going Crazy?
She is cheerful by day, but as night falls so comes the fear. The planes are coming. Have I drawn the blackout curtains? Where are the boys? She is a child again, during the Blitz, the bombs are falling, and all round her London is on fire.
'The boys' are my husband and his younger brother. They were born long after the war. Their auntie doted on them, in clearer times. Now she thinks of them as part of her own childhood.
Do I know where the Anderson Shelter is? She reminds me - again - that it is in the neighbours' garden. She looks round in terror: 'WHERE ARE THE BOYS?' The school was hit. Were they in there?
She repeatedly demands that I check the blackout curtains. She doesn't want the wardens coming to the door.
Now my children are awake and crying. They are curled up together for safety, listening for the Nazi planes in a remote Welsh cottage, where it's always 1941.
There is more to the war than the Holocaust.
So true...and WWII was the pivotal war in history. And we all paid a price for it...and continue to pay a price. As you mentioned with the lingering problems in your own family, you also know that it's spread throughout the U.S. and the world.
My father was a WWII vet and three years at war without the chance to speak with or see his wife and child. To stay sane, he wrote home several times a week and wrote about friends and what he could say about where he was and what was occuring.
A famous theologian and Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller spoke up about the nazis early in their administration. As a result, he spent 8 years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. He wrote a famous poem which illustrates how these things happen.
"First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me."
60 million dead from WWII. We should have learned. The war profiteers are still in business.
Thank you so much for this very important post and your very important work. I will get your book. When I joined Veterans For Peace in the early 90's (I believe it was founded in 1986) I thought it would be mostly veterans from the Vietnam War era. Much to my surprise it had many, many WWII and Korean War veterans. These were men who had never found a place to speak about what they had experienced. The only therapy for that generation had been drinking alcohol at the VFW. The trauma of what people had been through and endured in silence in life was heart breaking. WWII deeply affected the psyche of this nation in the ways you are now addressing. We are now a nation of people who do not understand the trauma and price of endless war since the Ruling Class of the United States ended the draft in 1973 because of the turmoil in the streets of the Vietnam War. The rest is now history. Our wars are fought by a permanent underclass caught in the permanent "poverty draft". What those men fought for in WWII has now been permanently betrayed. We should at least hear their stories as the testament to the evil systems of endless total war can reach. It is a warning now on the road of our current fate as a nation.
Again, my sincere thanks as one soul on this Earthly journey for your work,