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Friday, April 17, 2009 7:35 PM CDT
COLUMN: We can't truly know, but we can remember
By DAVE FOPAY, Staff Writer
dfopay@jg-tc.com
What does it take to make something real? How does someone with no experience with something begin to have the smallest understanding of what it was about?
It could be a father’s reluctance to tell a curious son a story that’s more than 30 years old.
It could be listening to a woman’s story and being surprised with her calling the most notorious symbol of her terrifying journey “small potatoes.”
It could be a scene from a movie, perhaps showing the extraordinary joy that comes to a starving person from merely biting into an apple or a man’s despondence at thinking he should have been able to save more people.
Those kinds of things help you come close to understanding, but none of them actually make it. They can’t, and I’m grateful that I’ll almost surely never really know what they’re like. I’m sad at the same time.
Charles Fopay was an Army tank officer during World War II. He was part of the Allies’ campaign in Europe. Years ago, when his teenage son asked him if he helped liberate or even saw any concentration camps, his only reply was, yes, but they were “small ones.”
Eva Kor was in one of those concentration camps, the most vilified of them all, Auschwitz. She once showed a visitor to her museum in Terre Haute a display of the cloth Stars of David that European Jews were once forced to wear. She practically dismissed them as a barely significant emblem of something that contained much more horrific moments.
Movies like “The Winds of War” and “Schindler’s List” do their best to portray agonizing moments. But they’re only portrayals.
But those all help us remember.
Tuesday marks this year’s observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day the observance falls on can vary from year to year, but it was originally tied to the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 1943 and is scheduled based on the anniversary of when Israel, born out of the recovery from the Holocaust, became a country.
We often hear concerns that the stories of World War II will soon become more difficult to tell. The people who lived them won’t be around much longer to tell them. I now also think of the aging of my own generation, the youngest of the children who heard at least some of the stories from parents who were there.
My dad would rather tell me a story about how his tank got separated from its unit and he and other soldiers ended up behind enemy lines without realizing it. Years later, it was a story told with a chuckle. I doubt if much about the war was actually funny.
Frustrated as I was when Dad’s description of what he saw was only about “small” concentration camps, years later I came to realize that there was likely a very good reason why he didn’t want to talk a lot about what he really saw.
But I still heard some stories. At least there’s that. It’s real.
I remember.
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just watching wrote on Apr 19, 2009 12:05 PM: