Serving under General Patton, my father followed in the wake of the D-Day landings, traveled across France with its roads littered with the dead while practicing his language skills, ending up at Dachau – a memory that haunted him until his death.
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New York, N.Y. I remember all the war stories my father (Dr. Stanford Leonard Luce, Jr.) would tell me as a child, and then later as a teen as we worked side-by-side building a house in the White Mountains together.
Trauma of liberation
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For survivors, the end of the war did not bring an end to their suffering. Liberation itself was extremely difficult for many survivors and the transition to freedom from the terror, brutality and starvation they had just endured was frequently traumatic:
As Allied forces fought their way across Europe and captured areas that had been occupied by the Germans, they discovered the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. In some places, the Nazis had tried to destroy all evidence of the camps to conceal the crimes that they had perpetrated there. In other places, the Allies found only empty buildings, as the Nazis had already moved the prisoners, often on death marches, to other locations. However, in many camps, the Allied soldiers found hundreds or even thousands of weak and starving survivors. Soviet forces reached Majdanek concentration camp in July 1944 and soon came across many other sites but often did not publicize what they had found; British and American units on the Western Front did not reach the concentration camps in Germany until the spring of 1945.[13][27]
When Allied troops entered the death camps, they discovered thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish survivors suffering from starvation and disease, living in the most terrible conditions, many of them dying, along with piles of corpses, bones, and the human ashes of the victims of the Nazi mass murder. The liberators were unprepared for what they found but did their best to help the survivors. Despite this, thousands died in the first weeks after liberation. Many died from disease. Some died from refeeding syndrome since after prolonged starvation their stomachs and bodies could not take normal food. Survivors also had no possessions. At first, they still had to wear their concentration camp uniforms as they had no other clothes to wear.[13][28]
During the first weeks of liberation, survivors faced the challenges of eating suitable food, in appropriate amounts for their physical conditions; recuperating from illnesses, injuries and extreme fatigue and rebuilding their health; and regaining some sense of mental and social normality. Almost every survivor also had to deal with the loss of many loved ones, many being the only one remaining alive from their entire family, as well as the loss of their homes, former activities or livelihoods, and ways of life.[25][29]
As survivors faced the daunting challenges of rebuilding their broken lives and finding any remaining family members, the vast majority also found that they needed to find new places to live. Returning to life as it had been before the Holocaust proved to be impossible. At first, following liberation, numerous survivors tried to return to their previous homes and communities, but Jewish communities had been ravaged or destroyed and no longer existed in much of Europe, and returning to their homes frequently proved to be dangerous. When people tried to return to their homes from camps or hiding places, they found that, in many cases, their homes had been looted or taken over by others. Most did not find any surviving relatives, encountered indifference from the local population almost everywhere, and, in Eastern Europe in particular, were met with hostility and sometimes violence.[25][30][31]
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My Father, 18, Helped Liberate Dachau at End of World War II (May 25, 2020)
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