Today is the 77th anniversary of the Liberation of Dachau. Interestingly enough, that event has a personal connection to your author. First, an interesting bit of history about the liberation. The “Liberator” wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t even in the military. She was 24-year old Margueritte Higgins, reporting for the New York Herald Tribune, who had bent every rule to finally get out of London and over to Europe, finally arriving in February 1945. The first woman to edit The Daily Cal at Berkeley in 1940 had been trying since her graduation in 1942 to become a “real” war correspondent. Being six feet tall, it really wasn’t surprising that she was mistaken for a soldier at Dachau. She would go on to write the best accounts of the Berlin Airlift and at age 29 was the first woman reporter to win the International News Pulitzer in 1950 for her first-person reporting of the disaster of the first six months of the Korean War. The specific winning article was “Everybody Get Down, Here We Go!” which she wrote from a foxhole on Red Beach after landing in the first wave at the Invasion of Inchon in September 1950.
I am crying as I read. My NW Chicago was so like Denver and it would be in my 20s that I realized this. My tears run, even now as I write this, because Dachau was ... and could have been the product of our lesser angels. The hate and mostly the indifference to those lessers let all that, as Margueritte Higgins and you wrote about here, happen. I can see the early steps with soft facism and the arching of attitudes in the far right in our country, in Ukraine and Russia, in Israel, in France, in Hungary and other Western democracies laying a more nuanced groundwork toward the same genocide. Thanks, TC. We who remembered have to be reminded. Those who only read about it in short, cleaned up Readers Digest versions of a history they were never a part of, must be taught. Never forget. Light the candle and repeat the story, share the truth in every household and school of this history lived and died for. Thousands, hundreds of thousand, millions with cruelty and intent, murdered in the name of ideology and indifference to life other than ones own. Thanks.
Great commentary, Tom. I suspect many of us on our side of the racial struggle "fence" had similar experiences. I grew up on Long Island and until I went to high school, I had never met a black person "in person", only in the movies..... But even then, literature and PBS did a job of educating me on how things were not so rosy for many people of color.
Two things stand out. On PBS, a black entertainer described his childhood in a mixed neighborhood. One day, the other kids, all white, started a game - when they saw him, they'd run down the street yelling "here comes the nigger, here comes the nigger!" He joined in, running down the street, yelling the same thing, not realizing that HE was the "nigger"..... That was #1.
Second was a well-known short story "A Short Wait Between Trains" - based on a true incident, it tells the story of several black soldiers waiting to be sent overseas to fight in North Africa, getting off a train in the south to have lunch. They are told they cannot eat in the station's dining room, but have to go out back to the kitchen where they will get what's left over from the meal being served inside. They happen to look inside the dining room and see that the people being fed inside are German prisoners of war being sent to a prison camp - being treated better than black soldiers fighting for the country..... Needless to say, it made quite an impression - fortunately one that has stuck with me over 60 years later. I'm with Rodney King - can't we all just get along?
Both stories are fascinating - the "liberator" and the "unliberated" in Denver. I have shared.
Do you know, as I write this today (Saturday), there's a section on the north of our very small town called "Tank Town." It is called that because of very large, abandoned tanks (I suppose grain?) and it is the neighborhood where most of the Hispanic citizens here live - in small, run down almost shanty-like houses, many with handicapped ramps leading to a back door. On the east side of our town, the same is true, but the inhabitants there are Black for the most part. Only in a few small "suburbs" on the outskirts of town can one find Hispanic and Black residents living in slightly better, slightly more "modern" homes. There are almost NO White residents in those burbs. I suspect this is true wherever we might travel even these days. Small towns, bigger towns, cities...all over this country. I have never understood this "need" to separate ourselves. We just cannot seem to learn about that house divided.
...if I'm not mistaken, there's a new book out (NOT the "Imperial Hotel" one you've already recommended, which is terrific) about a bunch of female WWII correspondents. I forget the title, but I recall (I think) that Marguerite Higgins is one of them. if anyone remembers the title, let me know.
I am crying as I read. My NW Chicago was so like Denver and it would be in my 20s that I realized this. My tears run, even now as I write this, because Dachau was ... and could have been the product of our lesser angels. The hate and mostly the indifference to those lessers let all that, as Margueritte Higgins and you wrote about here, happen. I can see the early steps with soft facism and the arching of attitudes in the far right in our country, in Ukraine and Russia, in Israel, in France, in Hungary and other Western democracies laying a more nuanced groundwork toward the same genocide. Thanks, TC. We who remembered have to be reminded. Those who only read about it in short, cleaned up Readers Digest versions of a history they were never a part of, must be taught. Never forget. Light the candle and repeat the story, share the truth in every household and school of this history lived and died for. Thousands, hundreds of thousand, millions with cruelty and intent, murdered in the name of ideology and indifference to life other than ones own. Thanks.
Great commentary, Tom. I suspect many of us on our side of the racial struggle "fence" had similar experiences. I grew up on Long Island and until I went to high school, I had never met a black person "in person", only in the movies..... But even then, literature and PBS did a job of educating me on how things were not so rosy for many people of color.
Two things stand out. On PBS, a black entertainer described his childhood in a mixed neighborhood. One day, the other kids, all white, started a game - when they saw him, they'd run down the street yelling "here comes the nigger, here comes the nigger!" He joined in, running down the street, yelling the same thing, not realizing that HE was the "nigger"..... That was #1.
Second was a well-known short story "A Short Wait Between Trains" - based on a true incident, it tells the story of several black soldiers waiting to be sent overseas to fight in North Africa, getting off a train in the south to have lunch. They are told they cannot eat in the station's dining room, but have to go out back to the kitchen where they will get what's left over from the meal being served inside. They happen to look inside the dining room and see that the people being fed inside are German prisoners of war being sent to a prison camp - being treated better than black soldiers fighting for the country..... Needless to say, it made quite an impression - fortunately one that has stuck with me over 60 years later. I'm with Rodney King - can't we all just get along?
The screaming danger is the way this country’s whites are leading us back to those days.
Such a harrowing story! Thank you for introducing me to Marguerite Higgins.
Both stories are fascinating - the "liberator" and the "unliberated" in Denver. I have shared.
Do you know, as I write this today (Saturday), there's a section on the north of our very small town called "Tank Town." It is called that because of very large, abandoned tanks (I suppose grain?) and it is the neighborhood where most of the Hispanic citizens here live - in small, run down almost shanty-like houses, many with handicapped ramps leading to a back door. On the east side of our town, the same is true, but the inhabitants there are Black for the most part. Only in a few small "suburbs" on the outskirts of town can one find Hispanic and Black residents living in slightly better, slightly more "modern" homes. There are almost NO White residents in those burbs. I suspect this is true wherever we might travel even these days. Small towns, bigger towns, cities...all over this country. I have never understood this "need" to separate ourselves. We just cannot seem to learn about that house divided.
A very moving story, excellently told. Thanks TC.
...if I'm not mistaken, there's a new book out (NOT the "Imperial Hotel" one you've already recommended, which is terrific) about a bunch of female WWII correspondents. I forget the title, but I recall (I think) that Marguerite Higgins is one of them. if anyone remembers the title, let me know.
Chilling. Shared.