This is written on Holocaust Remembrance Day, whenever it might be read. Years ago, I took a graduate course in English drama. The professor had an extensive background in the theater. He was a gentleman in the traditional sense and might even be described as “mild mannered.”
Somehow, I learned that he was not only a veteran of WWII but that he had been involved in the liberation if Auschwitz, the most notorious of the Nazi extermination camps. He told me had written his memory of that experience in the immediate aftermath of the expedition and he gave me a copy.
It has been so long since I read his memoir that only one part still remains vivid in my memory. This gentle soul expressed the opinion that all Germans should be executed. His horror went beyond those directly involved or even the Nazi party in general. The fact that he was an eyewitness to the effort to extirpate an entire race gave me insight into a horror that I could only read about as a student of history.
