The-Ave.US

 My brother and sister should look at this
picture and be ashamed. 

Today is the seventieth anniversary of our father’s entering Buchenwald to give care to inmates who had not yet escaped.  Robert’s photography and writings remain locked in a lawyer’s safe in Boston, decaying because my siblings are determined not to allow the images to be made available to those inmates and soldiers who still survive.

The awfulness of the things Robert saw, the challenge to a man who was a devoted physician and a Jew, must be seen to be believed.

This picture was taken by Margaret Bourke White when she arrived in Buchenwald on April 12 as a Life photographer,  That was the date for Patton’s official liberation.  Patton’s triumphal entry was  several days after the  camp had been liberated by inmates themselves and after the arrival of American soldiers who discovered the camp after meeting those inmates still well enough to flee.

My father was one of those Americans.  Acting as a free roaming medical company under orders from Eisenhower, my dad and his men were  the first medics to come to the aid of these prisoners.   Patton had issued orders banning unofficial photography and ordered my Dad’s men and other Americans to leave so the official forces could take over.  .Perhaps Patton’s orders were why these pictures were almost lost.  I found them, with a friend, in a cabinet three years after Robert’s death.  Since that time my siblings have gone to great lengths to prevent release of the materials with no stated reason other than hatred for me.

I do not hate many people.  I know my father hated the Nazis but looking at this picture form Bourke White, I am certain his first impulse was that of a doctor .. to give care for those afflicted inmates.

I would hope that this time of year, not only the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, but the beginning of Passover, would somehow be a time for a gesture of reconciliation.  If I can get those pictures out of that damned safe, my first goal will be to share them with the survivors.  The survivors … soldiers and inmates …  deserve a good memory of this horrible time.  That act should be done in my father’s name and together by the three of us.  My second goal will be  to put my father’s pictures and worlds together with what I can learn form the survivors into a book not only for my own children and granddaughter but again so that the three of us and all our grandchildren can share the unique role Robert Schwartz played treating the victims of the Nazi era with the world of people his story can inspire.

Bourke White’s picture, never published in Life magazine, may be of one of my father’s patients.  This poor person, man or woman, may still be alive but if so after 70 years, lives of all the survivors are short and the pictures may, in my brother’s own words, “rot” before they can be seen. That must not happen,