NEVER FORGET

1968. I grew up in a little logging town in the foot hills of the Oregon Cascades. We had a pretty decent high school. It was 1968 and something happened that probably couldn't be repeated in a lot schools today. I'd like to believe it could but, we were a lot closer to the time when these horrors happened and there were a lot more veterans still alive who saw these events with their own eyes.

We had a new social studies teacher and bless me if I can remember his name. He had done his stint in the army and had access to certain film archives. Movies that were taken in the liberated concentration camps of the Reich. I don't remember the film may have included footage taken by the Germans. I have to hand it to them. They kept really good records.

I watched a documentary a few years ago that included footage of a book used to record the deaths of prisoners who actually ended up in the camps and weren't sent to the gas chambers right off the train.It was crazy. Such and such a date. Such and such a time. 12 PM to1 PM everybody died of pneumonia. Next hour everybody died of typhus. It was crazy. The men taking the films and filling out the records probably never realized where those films would end up. After all the Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years. It lasted for twelve.

US history was a junior year class. Seniors who happened to have study halls during the same periods were allowed to watch too. I don't even remember if we had to have permission slips.

I went. I watched. I will NEVER FORGET.

To those participants in the demonstrations in Virginia last week. You know, the "men" with the torches, the shouts, the guns who are now trying to claim that they aren't really Nazis. They aren't really white supremacists. They aren't really, I don't know. Fill in the blanks with whatever you believe to be appropriate. They were there out of curiosity or some damn thing. You were there. We heard the shouts. We saw the twisted faces. We saw the torches that echoed the parades of the Brownshirts over eighty years ago.

Either have the guts to own up to it or stay under your rocks next time.