RSS

BUCHENWALD 116: Why can’t my brother understand why I want to share my Dad’s pictures of the camp with the survivors he met there?

 We are still in court.  

I share the pain of these children.  I am not a survivor, nor was my father.  My Dad, Robert, however, was one of the first Americans to see the camps; he entered Buchenwald as commanding officer of a small medical company and made pictures.

Robert Schwartz would wake up with nightmares about what he saw.   Perhaps my sister and brother, born five years and ten years after he returned from WWII, never listened  those nights when he could not sleep.  I did and know that he was scarred.  He gave me the Argus C3 that made the pictures. It sits today in my library along with other mementos Dad gave to me as token of memories not just of the camp but of the way he felt after leaving Buchenwald.

My goal is simple.  The pictures made by my father during the liberation of Buchenwald belong jointly to the three of us .. my  brother Hugh, my sister Stephanie, and myself.  We signed a contract to gift these to a museum or university that would share these with the public.

As executor, Hugh took possession.  He has now threatened to let the picture rot rather than ever be made public.   He has even refused to even state they still exist. He will not  allow me to even see them.

The ONLY issue is that my brother and sister, for some reason they will not state, want these images destroyed.  Why?


0 Comments Add Yours ↓

  1. theaveeditor #
    1

    From FACEBOOK Kit Minden

    I can’t tell you any more than this brief tale but about 7 years ago, I met an older woman in a shop who told me that her father was one of the first men to enter one of the camps – Buchenwald or Auschwitz – and he took pictures and then insisted she (7 years old) and her mother fly over to see in person, to bear witness, so it would never be forgotten.

    Please forgive me for forgetting more details. I have MS and my memory has random wholes in it.)(