Tomorrow, starts the new year. My guests arrive soon. Before I enjoy welcoming friends I need to spend a moment thinking about this time of year, What a horrid time of year this was before my father and others arrived to liberate Buchenwald.
The most notorious of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Auschwitz. That was sixty nine years ago.
The SS marched nearly 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzisław Śląski (German: Loslau), 35 miles away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Approximately 15,000 prisoners died on the way.[ Elie Wiesel and his father, Chlomo were sent on the march to Buchenwald camp (350 miles from Auschwitz) Just 11 days later, news arrive that American soldiers were on their way towards Buchenwald but Chlomo died from starvation.
A warning to the average reader: The author of this blog (##################### personal email address deleted) makes statements on this blog that are sometimes misleading and sometimes fiction. For example, he writes here that “my father’s photos of the liberation of the camps are lying in my brother’s lawyer;s office, deteriorating for no reason that makes sense.” Indeed, it is SMS who has held up the donation of the estate’s WWII memorabilia to a major University by (a) withholding some of the materials at his residence in Seattle despite his signing off on an agreement to return them to Hugh and (b) failing to sign off on a Deed of Gift to donate the materials.