A Pause to Remember

    ◆    75 years ago this week
    ◆    July 23-25, 1944

Soviet troops liberated the first of the concentration camps- Majdanek in Poland.

In Guns at Last Light, the third book of his amazing trilogy on World War II, Rick Atkinson says that at this point, the war came to have a "vivid moral structure." As the Allies were moving toward Paris, the Soviet troops in Poland had arrived at the Majdanek camp. A New York Times reporter said, "I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth." (Atkinson, p. 183ff)

He had no idea that he had only seen the tiniest glimpse into a horror that we still have difficulty putting into perspective. The full horror that would be unveiled in the winter and spring of 1945 still stuns and paralyzes the imagination.