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An Ominous Anniversary
Submitted by Paul Paolicelli on 29 April 2009 - 1:51pm.
At 9:30 on the morning of April 29, 1945, the tanks of US 101st Tank Battalion reached the gates of the Dachau Concentration Camp, ending twelve years of forced captivity for the survivors of over two hundred thousand of Germany’s “enemies of the state.” Dachau had the distinction of being the first of the camps built by the Nazi régime in 1933, just months after Adolph Hitler’s party took over the German Reichstag. It’s estimated that over 25,000 inmates died there during those dozen years. And those numbers are mild compared with the horror of the factory camps further east in Poland. One of the soldiers liberating the camp that day was a certain Louis “Luigi” Rondinaro, father of our anchorman, Steve, here at WWAY-TV. The elder Rondinaro would have the distinction, just a week later, of becoming one of the last seriously wounded soldiers in the European theatre. A firefight skirmish with a German unit a few hundred kilometers from Dachau would cost Luigi his leg. I’ve been to Dachau several times. While working as an army PIO based in Bamberg, Germany, I was responsible for the coverage of a unit under our command in Dachau. I’d stay in temporary quarters—the former commandant’s room which eerily looked out over all of the now mostly empty area. The Germans turned the place into a gedenkdensplatz – a memorial garden. I’d always wonder what must have been in that man’s mind while watching the inhuman conditions that he had been charged with maintaining. As a journalist, I’ve never forgotten the many places I’ve seen in Europe where human kind had been less than kind to one another. But Dachau was especially haunting. There could have been no mistaking the suffering there, nor any misinterpretation of the intent of the government which organized that suffering. It was chilling to think about then, it remains so today. I have to remind myself that, in the crush of the day’s news, it’s important to maintain a perspective on things. The 401 k’s down, there’s a flu moving north from Mexico, kids are having a tough time finding a job out of school. These are difficult times. But they are not devastating times. These days can dampen the human spirit, but they will not and cannot destroy it. We need to remember what Dachau stands for. And to be grateful that we had Luigi Rondinaro and his generation to help change that world forever. By: Paul Paolicelli N.C. HeadlinesN.C. Sports |
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When I was in school,
When I was in school, history was my favorite subject. My uncles were in WWII, but instead of Germany, four of them were in Pearl Harbor when it was attacked. Unbelievably, they all survived.
We studied the Holocaust in school, but not to the extent I thought we should. The survivors are leaving us and I wonder how it will be remembered in the future. My son's high school history class studied Hitler's life last year, and I was amazed to find that instead of focusing on the Holocaust, the teacher was actually painting Hitler as a positive figure, highlighting his intelligence and his involvement in the development of the automobile industry in Germany, and then only finished his later years by explaining he was obviously insane. I felt the need to go into it much further with him, and he was astonished at the extent of the killing, as that is not what they were being taught.
I was further surprised when "The Reader" hit the theatres. I did not see the movie, but when I learned the subject matter I decided to read the book. In all the history classes I ever attended, I don't ever recall the mention that any of the concentration camp guards were women. Perhaps it was because they were not technically considered "SS". I looked into it further and was amazed that the viciousness of the women at times outweighed that of their male counterparts, and equally amazed at the light prison sentences some of them received. There were some courts that apparently hung them if any culpability was proven, but there were others that sentenced them to five or fifteen years in prison for being responsible for the deaths of thousands. And there were also so many who escaped and never faced any justice.
This is a part of history that we always should be reminded of. Most people have no idea what Dachau, Treblinka, Auschwitz Birkenau or Sobibor even were.