Spoken from the Heart Read Free Page A

city, Cologne, under a hail of bullets, it would have been the guns under Daddy's command firing. After Germany surrendered, Daddy stayed on in Europe because the plan was that the troops would then be shipped over to Japan. By the time he was released to go home, it was nearly December of 1945, and the seas were too stormy to cross. He wrote to Mother from Paris and Dieppe on thin sheets of USO airmail paper. In one letter, he told her that he didn't like to go to a club and have too many beers with his friends, "because then I get to missing you so much that I can't stand it."
    He finally arrived home in January of 1946. Along with his meager gear, he carried with him eight tiny two-by-three-inch photos from Nordhausen, Germany, the site of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Mother kept them along with some letters in an old latch-top cigar box. As a child, I used to take them out one by one and examine them, holding them up to the light to study the tiny images frozen in time by the camera's lens, trying to decipher them. They were pictures of row upon row of bodies of the dead, some bloated, some so skeletal that they were little more than bones with the last remnants of skin stretched over them, stark white, sunken torsos in which you could count every rib. There were three separate rows of bodies, some naked, some still wearing the rough striped pants and shirts that the Nazis had forced upon them. A few were covered, looking like hastily wrapped mummies in half decay. The rows of human beings stretched out beyond the buildings. My dad had written on the back of one of the photos how the lines of corpses continued well beyond "the second white building." On another photo, showing the grotesque contorted final death grips of naked men, he wrote, after a long explanation, "Tear it up if you wish." But no one ever could, ever did, ever wanted to. He had photos too of a baby and a small child alongside, the child's arm reaching out in one last, futile effort to cover and to comfort the baby. Beside them are the bare legs of a horribly shrunken young man. Starvation had consumed his legs to the point of nothingness. In one last photo, the bodies seem to stretch as far as the eye or camera could see. There were, I now know, about five thousand of them.
    Daddy's overall unit, the 104th, the Timberwolves, had liberated Nordhausen. His battalion had fought its way into the heavily fortified German town. He was among the early wave of troops to enter the camp, sent to render aid and to witness what had happened at Mittelbau-Dora. In the photos, you can see clusters of GIs, their feet in the same dirty, scarred combat boots that most of them had worn since Normandy, standing at silent attention beside the field of corpses. Barely one thousand prisoners were alive when they arrived. A plea had gone out for every Army medic in the region to come to the camp to treat anyone who might have survived. Many of the living were hiding among the dead or were too weak even to roll away from those who had died next to them. They lay amid disease and human waste, sometimes covered with dust from a bombing. Three or four living men had spent almost a week trapped under decaying bodies in a bomb crater. Some of the newly freed tried with their last remaining strength to salute their liberators. The American GIs dropped their heads into their hands and wept.
    My father carried these photos home, most of them taken by one of his unit buddies. He wrote on the back of one small rectangle that he thought the photo would look different, but the camera lens had been too small to capture the enormity of the scene. Yet Daddy did not talk about Nordhausen. Once every year or two, when the three of us would open the box of photos, he could not bring himself to say a single word. Not long after he returned, Daddy told my mother that while inside the camp he had come upon an American Army nurse wielding a shovel in her hand. Before her stood a group of