Liberator of a Nazi death camp looks back

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-schmich-04-14-2010-20100414,0,7616832.column

‘They didn’t have the energy to cheer,’ Kenilworth man recalls

Mary Schmich

April 14, 2010

No one cheered.

That's the first thing Carl Levy, sitting in his sunroom in Kenilworth 65 years later, says about the liberation.

No grateful tears, huzzahs or smiles, no cinematic fanfare.

On Thursday, Levy will be among 120 veterans honored in Washington as liberators of World War II German concentration camps, but he didn't think of himself that way then. Neither did the other guys in his platoon.

On that day in 1945 — May 2, still cold enough for wool uniforms — most of the guys, he says, probably weren't sure what they were seeing. snip

"In those days, a lowly infantryman was a lowly infantryman," he says. "There were no lectures on the grand scheme of things."

But Levy knew. He was Jewish, and Jews knew.

A compound. Guard towers. A wire fence and, on the other side, human beings in striped uniforms, filthy, starved to the bone.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

1. I want to give this man a handshake, a salute, and a hug.

If I saw what they saw, live, instead of in old documentaries, I think I'd have to be committed to a mental institution. :cry:

Years ago, when renewing my passport, the one next in line to me was a FEB veteran. He was going to some war anniversary ceremony in Italy. (Therefore the year was probably 2005.) I enthusiastically saluted him, and I quote myself:

"You. Kicked. Nazi. Butt. You deserve EVERY accolade you get. Every one."