Ethel Kennedy is 80 today.
Joel Grey is 76.
Louise Lasser — remember Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (No? Neither do I.) Anyway, Louise is 69 today.
Columnist and author Ellen Goodman is 67.
And Joss Stone is 21, old enough to buy shoes.
It was on this date in 1945 that American troops entered Buchenwald, second only to Auschwitz in its horrors.
Many of the soldiers who entered Buchenwald on this day had been fighting in World War II since D-Day. They had participated some of the bloodiest battles in history. But nothing they’d seen prepared them for what they saw at Buchenwald. Several of the soldiers carried Kodak cameras, and so they took photographs of the surviving prisoners and the dead, so that people would believe what they had seen. Their photographs showed human beings so emaciated that they could barely walk, and victims’ bodies were stacked around the camp like piles of wood.
Sergeant Fred Friendly, who would go on to work as a CBS producer, wrote to his mother, “I want you to never forget or let our disbelieving friends forget, that your flesh and blood saw this.”
One of the reporters who covered the liberation of Buchenwald was Edward R. Murrow. He was so disturbed by what he saw that he couldn’t write about it for days, and let a subordinate break the story.
One of the children liberated at the camp that day was a teenager named Elie Wiesel, who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He had been forced to march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald a few weeks earlier, and his father had recently died in the camp. He saw American jeeps rolling into the camps, and he later wrote, “I will never forget the American soldiers and the horror that could be read in their faces. I will especially remember one black sergeant, a muscled giant, who wept tears of impotent rage and shame. … We tried to lift him onto our shoulders to show our gratitude, but we didn’t have the strength. We were too weak to even applaud him.”
The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media
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