//------------------------------//
// No Words 
// Story: My Neighbor's War 
// by Antiquarian 
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Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria, April, 1945

It was the paleness in Billy Oswald’s face that warned First Sergeant Arrow that something was wrong. Billy Oswald was the unflappable sort – a paratrooper who’d survived that gruesome drop with the rest of the 101st last June and taken everything the Germans had thrown at them since in stride. Danger never fazed him, and hardship only seemed to embolden him. Even in the face of charging tanks and pounding artillery he’d retained his laconic temperament. 

So, when Billy Oswald looked pale, John Arrow ordered his men to draw extra ammo before boarding the trucks. 

The drive out to the camp was unusually quiet. At first, the men tried to extract the truth from Billy Oswald, but the man wouldn’t budge. He only told them that the Major wanted them all out at ‘the camp’ where some of the men had ‘found something.’ When asked if it was a POW camp, he said wasn’t sure. When asked what had rattled him, he said nothing. 

John Arrow’s finger hovered near his trigger guard the whole drive.

When they arrived, the first thing he noticed was how still it was – statuesque, like the world was holding its breath, or perhaps staring in mute fascination. No, the first sergeant decided, not fascination. Horror. 

He couldn’t say why, at first. From a distance, the camp looked much like any other POW camp. Larger, perhaps, with different structures and layout, but the familiar barbed wire and guard towers were far from unusual. 

But that infernal stillness hung in the air – a force invisible and oppressive. It smelled of ash and felt… cold. 

Cold despite the warmth of the shining sun that watched over the beautiful spring day.

First Sergeant Arrow and his men dismounted the trucks and approached the camp. As they did, another smell joined that of the ash. 

The stench of death. And, with it, something worse. John Arrow had learned long ago what death smelled like. That day, he learned what death felt like.

Cries of horror filled the air as the men saw the prisoners. Like skeletons they were, their sickly skin stretched over bones. They lingered by the wire, swaying on their feet or drifting aimlessly around the camp. With sunken features and dead eyes, they resembled mummies or ghouls. 

It was then that John Arrow heard them – heard the mortal frailty of their moaning on the cool spring breeze, a tale of lament in the universal tongue of humanity. 

“Merciful God,” whispered one of the men behind him. “Sarge, what the hell is this place?”

John Arrow put a hand to his mouth and stared, tears forming in his eyes. Instinctively, he tried to pray, but he could not form the words. Oh God, he began over and over again. Oh God. Finally, he found the voice to answer.

“I… I don’t know.”







John Arrow answered his men truthfully that day. While the rumors of Nazi atrocities were well-known amongst the rank and file, the true devilishness of the Holocaust was shrouded in legend and supposition. Only with the end of the war did the truth of the matter come fully to light. When it did, the world was stunned into silence.

Had he known, First Sergeant Arrow would have told his men that the place was called Kaufering, a system of eleven subcamps of the Dachau Concentration Camp. There the Nazis murdered 15,000 of the 30,000 captives, most of whom were Jewish.

Another word John Arrow might have used was ‘genocide,’ but, even had the full truth of the concentration camps been known to him then, he still could not have called it genocide. True, the word, coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, had been published in 1944 as part of Lemkin’s ongoing efforts to ensure that such acts of barbarity would be criminalized in international law. However, it would not see any great use until after the war, and would not be fully codified in international law until 1948.

Lemkin had warned civil leaders in the United States government about the Nazi atrocities early in the war, and the Polish resistance leader Witold Pilecki even provided detailed intelligence he’d obtained by infiltrating Auschwitz, but the information had been suppressed, and the details he knew were not disseminated to the troops before they found the first camps. When the Seventh United States Army liberated Kaufering in 1945, they discovered that evil in all its rawness. 

When Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, discovered the extent of the horrors his men had found, he ordered that every inch of the concentration camps be documented. He predicted, correctly, that one day men would seek to deny that the Holocaust ever happened. Eisenhower was determined that no one ever be able to forget the atrocity.

Despite his best efforts, some have forgotten the camps, the furnaces, the gas. 

The men who liberated them never could.