Rosebushes at the gates of hell
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My grandfather had a camera, and he took photographs at Dachau. They ended up in his wartime scrapbook along with photos of Camp Old Gold, the Rhine, dusty German roads, bomber planes in the sky, and the Austrian Alps. I saw the scrapbook for the first time in 2015, when my grandmother brought it out at my grandfather's funeral. I knew my grandfather had been at Dachau. He had even shown me some of his war 'souvenirs,' as he called them, from Berchtesgaden. I had heard about the scrapbook over the years from my aunts and uncles, who mentioned it in low tones when the subject of my grandfather's wartime experience came up. But it had mostly remained stowed away in the dark, out of sight and out of mind.
The author's grandfather's wartime scrapbook.
Clark Family Collection
As I turned its brittle pages, I understood why. There were black-and-white photographs of cattle cars on a railroad track with their doors half-open — death trains from Buchenwald, full of corpses. Hills of bodies outside the gas chamber and crematorium. Bodies on long flat carts, pulled by horses. Dead German soldiers on the ground. An enormous pile of clothes and striped uniforms. American GIs standing around, stunned. I knew what I was looking at, but my grandfather didn't. Not then.
Like many American soldiers who witnessed horrors in Nazi Germany, my grandfather wanted to forget. He had helped liberate the Nazis' victims and should have been proud of the small role he played fighting fascism. But he never mentioned Dachau to me, even though he loved talking about history and politics. Somehow, I knew not to bring it up.
He finally allowed my aunt to interview him about the war in 2011, when he was in his late 80s. He spoke dispassionately about what he had seen at Dachau and didn't give many details. 'We went around the back of it. And that's when it was bad, you know,' he said. My aunt attempted to draw him out, but his answers were vague. 'You change a little bit,' was all he said about his emotions then, and after. But I'd heard the story about how he once approached a couple of truck drivers who were talking about how the Holocaust had never happened. My grandfather told them to read their history, because he was there. He had seen it with his own eyes.
The author's great-aunt Ann Clark, who made the scrapbook, with the author's grandfather Herbert J. Clark in front of their home on Columbus Ave. in Somerville during his second furlough from the war in 1944.
Clark Family Collection
In the summer of 2023, I traveled to Germany to research my novel, partially based on my grandfather's experience in Bavaria during the spring of 1945. I tried to retrace his wartime route. I went to Berchtesgaden and took Hitler's gaudy gilded elevator up to the Kehlsteinhaus — the 'Eagle's Nest,' an old Nazi chalet perched on the edge of a small mountain, with stunning views of the Alps. Now, improbably, the Eagle's Nest was a busy restaurant full of tourists and hikers who sat in the June sun with steins of golden beer. Apart from the historical photos that hung on some walls, it was hard to imagine Hitler relaxing there with the Nazi top brass. My grandfather had been here at the end of the war, he said, and had taken a swastika flag. American GIs had carved their names into the marble fireplace. I looked for his name but couldn't find it.
The next day I walked through Dachau's museum, reconstructed barracks, gas chamber, and crematorium. I stood where I thought my grandfather had stood 78 years before, when he had taken his photographs. I still didn't know how to think about those photos. I worried, in my worst moments, that they were some kind of macabre war souvenir, like the flag he'd taken from Berchtesgaden. But in the crematorium at Dachau, I saw a photograph of local Germans forced by American soldiers to view the murdered victims' corpses. I thought I understood, then, why my grandfather had taken the photos. They were documentary evidence that this had really happened. Later, I learned that my grandfather had developed those photographs in Germany and sent them back home to Somerville, to get the word out about the horror he had witnessed at Dachau. 'You can't tell me the Germans didn't know,' he said in his interview with my aunt, referring to the townspeople of Dachau. He never forgot the sight of a German woman pruning her rosebushes not far from Dachau's 'gates of hell' — a comment that struck me anew when I watched Jonathan Glazer's 'The Zone of Interest,' with its scenes of Hedwig Höss, wife of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, lovingly tending her garden as smoke from the camp's chimneys rises upward in the distance.
When I finished my research in Germany, I returned to New York and worked on my novel. I decided to incorporate a transcription of my grandfather's words from his interview about Dachau. I was writing fiction, but I couldn't bring myself to make up those details. I did not want his testimony to vanish. Still, I struggled to understand what he had been through at Dachau, and I worried about appropriating Jewish suffering. He was a liberator, not a survivor. I was wary about claiming any kind of trauma on his behalf — this was a man who would not even watch 'Saving Private Ryan'
because he was uncomfortable with its themes of heroism. And yet, as I researched the stories of other GIs in the Blackhawk Division, I came to feel that what these young men went through at Dachau was its own kind of hell, one that many of them never forgot.
The author's grandfather before his deployment during training at Camp Cook in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
Clark Family Collection
My family is not Jewish, but the Holocaust shadowed my grandfather's life. Dachau poisoned and twisted everything it touched, including the lives of those German townspeople looking away in the Dachau museum's photos — a larger metaphor for Germany in the immediate postwar years. As popular support for Germany's far right-wing AfD party and other fascist threats around the world grow, so does the need to revisit the lessons of Dachau.
Soon, the last of World War II's survivors and veterans will be gone. But the photographs, diaries, letters, and scrapbooks will remain. As memories of the war fade, and as we face a growing and pernicious skepticism about the ravages of the Holocaust, I am grateful my grandfather took those photos. I think I now understand why he took them, and what they truly cost. He exposed a horror too much for words.
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