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REMEMBERING LA WRENCE CANE David Cane A     American Army, my father, Lawrence Cane, participated in the liberation of the notorious Nordhausen concentration camp in the closing days of the Second World War. Some of the U.S. Army photographs that he brought home after the war documented scenes of starvation and death as well as attempts by the Nazis to cover up the evidence by burning some of the 3,000 dead that they left behind as they fled the victorious Allied armies. After the liberation of the camp, Germans from nearby Nordhausen had been forced by the American Army to come to the camp to witness what had happened in their midst and to bury the dead, and these scenes too were portrayed in the photos. In the spring of 1995 I decided to donate these photographs to the Photo Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, but first I wanted to learn more about the origins of the pictures. Unfortunately, I could no longer ask my father, since he had died in 1976 at the age of 64. Visiting my mother in Richmond , Virginia, I told her that I intended to donate the Nordhausen photos to the Holocaust Museum, and I asked her what she remembered about where the photographs came from. Her reply was completely unexpected. ‘‘Why don’t you look at Daddy ’s letters?’’ she responded. ‘‘Perhaps you’ll find the answer there.’’ I had no idea what letters she was talking about. ‘‘I saved all the letters that he wrote to me while he was in the service,’’ she explained. ‘‘I also kept a scrapbook at the time. They are all in a box in the attic.’’ In fact, there were just over 300 letters in all, written in the neat, clear handwriting that I knew so well. Most were one to three pages in length and together they covered the entire period xl REMEMBERING LAWRENCE CANE of his Army service, beginning with his induction at Fort Dix, New Jersey at the end of August 1942, through his basic training at Geiger Field in Spokane, Washington, then the Engineer Officer ’s Candidate School (OCS) at Fort Belvoir, Virginia and Military Intelligence training at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, his training in England, and his entry into combat, starting with the D-Day landing on Utah Beach, the fighting in Normandy and the liberation of France and Belgium, the invasion of Germany, the Battle of the Bulge, the crossing of the Rhine and the collapse of the Reich, followed by military occupation service, and ending with the long wait pending demobilization and return to the States in November 1945. And indeed, among the letters was one that he wrote on April 15, 1945, three days after he had witnessed the nightmarish scenes at Nordhausen, mourning the death of President Roosevelt and describing his reaction to seeing the Camp: In my rather extensive career as a soldier I have seen much death and a great deal of suffering. But since this final push has been under way we have been overrunning some of the indescribable murder mills that have been running full blast since the Nazis came to power twelve years ago. Here were scenes so monstrous, so grisly that the imagination palls. Never, so long as I live, will I forget the horrible sights, the tales of the pitiful survivors whom we liberated. The worst one of all that I have seen was a concentration camp for politicals. Nothing in all the written history of man can equal, or even approach, the infamy and the degradation, the sadistic depravity , the barbarism of Germany under Hitler. These letters opened up an entire world to me. Here was the man I had known through the eyes of a son, and yet here was much more. Here he was again as a young man—a veteran of the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War for whom the fight against Franco and the war against Hitler and the Nazis were part of the same continuum, a struggle for freedom and basic human decency against tyranny and oppression and barbarism of a kind and extent unrivaled in all the sad, brutal history of the world. Here was his idealism, his intense interest in history and politics, his constant effort to see the larger picture. Here was his repeated frustration and despair over his many fruitless attempts to obtain a combat assignment, as well as his dedication and personal [3.129.13...

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