වහා සිා
ᅰᅰᅰᅰᅰᅰᅰᅰᅰᅰᅰᅰᅰᅰ gesture
ʕ ʕ ʕ ʕ ʔ
ʕ ʕ ʔ
ʕ ʕ ʕ
ʕ ʕ ʕ ʕ
ʕ ʕ ʕ ʕ ʕ ʕ ʕ ʕ
What's in it?
I don't know.
He wouldn't tell me.
But he wanted you to have him.
Oh my god.
Dear Daniel,
This letter is probably a shock to you.
I apologize and hope you'll indulge in dying man's last wish.
I know I will die soon, but I can't move on without first getting this out.
What you hold in your hands is the culmination of my experience at the Buckingmore concentration camp in April 1945.
I have not spoken or written of it until now, though I thought of it every day.
This year, as I near my own death, the memories haunt me even more.
Today is April the 11th, the anniversary of the liberation of Buckingmore.
Today, for the first and last time in my life, I will commemorate it by telling you all I dare remember.
We had no idea what we were really getting ourselves into,
but had enough firepower to handle about anything, or so we thought.
As we marched into the complex, we got the word that the Germans had fled.
We were spared the fight, at least on that day.
I was just beginning to understand where we were,
but I was in no way prepared for what I was about to see, hear and smell.
I don't know what on earth could smell so bad.
Most days, I wish I'd never found out.
When we reached the compound, ragged bands of half-starred people crept out, timidly raising their hands.
We stood our weapons down to let them be at ease,
but they just stared back at us like living skeletons finally waking from a nightmare.
They pressed against the barbed wire, speaking in languages I didn't understand.
I can't imagine what they must have gone through.
I was ordered to proceed through the main gate,
with a few others we pressed inside and worked our way past the first building.
That's where I saw them, the most horrific thing I've ever seen.
They were stacked like gold, body upon body.
All of them dead, stripped and arranged in rows.
God knows how many rows.
I didn't think it possible, but the stench got worse, stronger.
It was then that I noticed this thick, black, small, douchy part of that monstrous chimney.
They were burning them.
My God, I couldn't believe it.
They were burning them in custom-built robins with stacked iron doors just large enough to start corpse.
They could burn 30 corpse at a time,
and yet still couldn't keep up with the piling bodies.
They were dying faster than they could burn them.
That night I sat with a few other prisoners who spoke English.
They told me the stories of what had happened there,
and the stories of what they did to them.
Stories I wouldn't have believed the day before, but now.
It was the most brutally real experience of my life.
Someone once said,
the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
That is why I had to write this to you.
17% of Americans don't even believe that the Holocaust ever happened.
They don't believe it happened.
I am to blame, Daniel, because I did nothing.
I saw it, said nothing.
I photographed and locked those photos away.
I should have shown them to the world.
I should have said, this cannot be forgotten.
We cannot forget what we are capable of.
It cannot happen again.
I am sorry to burn you with this Daniel,
but I did nothing for 56 years.
I am asking you to do what I did not.
Finish what I could not start.
Make them understand.
Use these photographs.
Use my words.
Make them believe.
This legacy I give to you.
This is your inheritance.
This is your inheritance.
This is your inheritance.
