I’m reading, The Day the War Ended, by Martin Gilbert. It’s a bunch of personal accounts of the days leading up to, and after, V-E day.
It’s filling in some blanks in my knowledge of those days, though there’s a lot of repetition (and sometimes the details are too narrow to be interesting to me. I mean, letters about brothers and sisters and reminiscences).
Of course, there are stories of the liberation of the camps. How outraged Americans killed every single guard in one camp, for example.
This reminded me of a story I heard a while back about the aged survivors of the camps. 40% of people experience some form of dementia by the time they turn 80, and the survivors are no different.
Dementia is heartbreaking, but I think theirs is the worst imaginable. Some of them think they’re still in Auschwitz. Others are forever looking for their families among the rubble of Europe. They may hoard food and keep it in drawers.
The good news, as such, is that some of the “old-aged homes” recognize the issue and work to mitigate it.
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