LIBERATION OF BUCHENWALD

CHAPTER 12

The clipping even had some quotes straight from my grandfather about the war and pictures of all of them at the reunion!

Now while looking at some of these new photos, I noticed pictures of buildings with barbed wire fences and German words painted on the sides of the buildings. I immediately had a flashback from childhood. I had seen some of these photos before! My flashback was a memory I had in elementary school. Not only had I seen these photos before, I actually had held these photos in my hands! In fact, when I was younger I found them accidentally, took them to school, and got in trouble for it! The problem was, I had no idea the full significance of them at that time, but I was just about to find out!

You see when I was in about first or second grade, I used to go through my grandfather’s briefcase. After the war, he was a carpenter. He would often carry that briefcase to jobs and take me with him. He would let me carry his briefcase to make me feel like a part of the team. The real reason why I loved that briefcase was because he had these really cool “flat” carpenter pencils (so they wouldn’t roll) and he had a battery operated old school calculator. When you turned it on, the screen would light up red. I always wanted to carry it and get into that brief case to use those cool pencils and that calculator. Not to mention, I loved it because it had a cool combination lock on the outside built in. I would like to consider myself pretty bright, even at a young age, so it wasn’t hard for me to crack the code. It was “1, 2, 3” on the left side and “4, 5, 6” on the right.

Anyways, one day as I was flipping through his briefcase, I found these old black and white photos stashed in the back. I will never forget it because they were photos of stacks and stacks of bodies, photos of buildings with barbed wire, and photos of buildings with German words painted on the side! These were some of the same photos that my mom, uncle, and aunt just sent me! I remember taking the photos to school to show the librarian because they always had a historical display set up in the hallway and I’m not exactly sure what happened after that, but the photos were taken from me and I remember my mom scolding me when I got home. I never saw or heard of those photos ever again, until now!

I Facebook messaged my mom right away about the photos she just sent me. I told her thanks for the photos but I know there are others and I knew what the missing ones were. Not that I wanted them for this publication, because I would never put them in here due to their history and graphic nature, I just wanted to solve the mystery of their ultimate demise. I asked where the other photos were. She didn’t know so she asked my Uncle Mike who said that some were given to my Uncle Tom in Florida to donate to a local Holocaust museum.

Within a few minutes, my mom messaged my Uncle Tom and we were told that those photos that I remember so vividly were ultimately donated to the South Florida Holocaust Museum after my grandfather’s passing. Then my Uncle Tom revealed to my mom the next level of this never ending rabbit hole and pointed to the obvious elephant in the room! Just as you and I were probably wondering, where did these photos come from and why. The answer - my grandfather took the photos, while in Germany, and on the day he helped to liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp! BOOM! My mind just exploded!

I could not believe what I had just found out! This was completely insane! I immediately started down this rabbit hole, scouring the internet for information on Buchenwald, and even tried to find the photos that were donated to the South Florida Holocaust Museum. I figured that they might be published online for research or maybe in one of the photos of the