Unpleasant Photograph Warning: “Bergen-Belsen through the eyes of its liberator”

Last updated on: April 15, 2015 at 12:14 pm by Dan Peterson

Unpleasant Photograph Warning: “Bergen-Belsen through the eyes of its liberator” 2015-04-15T12:14:33-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The liberation of Bergen-Belsen, seventy years ago today.

In less than a week, my wife and I will be in Israel again. And, roughly a week after that, we’ll be walking with our group through Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s museum and memorial to the millions of Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

A very few of those who’ve accompanied us to Israel in the past have objected to this visit. One once declined even to get off the bus for it.

To me, though, it’s a solemn duty. It’s my obligation never to forget, and to try to ensure that others don’t forget. I feel that I owe that both to the victims and to my father, who was among the liberators of the concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, and who was marked for life by his experience there.

Whenever I’m in the vicinity of Linz or Salzburg, I make a point of visiting Mauthausen. It’s not fun. I don’t count it as a tourist activity. It’s an occasion for reverence and for reflection.

I feel that a visit to Jerusalem is enhanced by a visit to Yad Vashem. It helps to understand the founding of the State of Israel, and the attitude of Israelis toward the threats that surround them. And, even more importantly, by giving us a glimpse both of extreme human evil and of millions of lives brought cruelly and prematurely to an end, it helps us to grasp more deeply our desperate need for the Atonement and Resurrection of Christ. In that sense, it’s a fitting prelude to the visits to Gethsemane, Golgotha, and the Garden Tomb that follow it in the next day or two of the tour itinerary.

Here’s an account, which I offer in that spirit, of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416948/bergen-belsen-through-eyes-its-liberator-bernice-lerner

It’s very much like what my father told me as I was growing up. He wanted me to know, and he wanted me never to let the memory fade.

I’ve tried to honor that request.

It’s quite bizarre, in that light, that I have an obsessive anonymous critic online who, among other things, has delighted for roughly five years now (perhaps more) in publicly labeling me an anti-Semite.

Several years ago, he was even claiming that he’d accompanied me on a tour to Israel and witnessed my ludicrous antics, my bigotry, my perpetual rage, and my shameless lies there at first hand. His claim turned out, unsurprisingly, to be complete fiction. (He’s finally admitted it now, chortling over what he plainly regards as a clever bit of deception — although it actually never deceived anybody but the most gullible in his tiny, embittered, angry audience.)

I wish, though, that he really had accompanied me through Yad Vashem. I wish that he could walk with me through the camp at Mauthausen.

Perhaps, then, he might come to understand that anti-Semitism isn’t an amusing weapon to be casually and dishonestly deployed against someone whom he’s chosen to regard as an enemy.

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