Picture: Tyranny, censorship seen in Nazi camp
War leaves sights that are never forgotten, some turning into scars that shape lifelong ideals for those who witnessed them.
NCR “Nancy Carol” Davis used one such sight her father witnessed to drive home the importance of freedom to the crowed gathered Monday, May 27, for the Memorial Day Service in Veterans Memorial Park.
Davis has written a book about her mother’s experiences serving as a nurse in General George S. Patton’s Third Army as his troops made their way across Europe in World War II.
But it was two stories she used about her father’s experiences that spoke to the long lasting affects of war’s experiences.
Davis told how as a little girl she was going through her father’s billfold and found an awful picture. Not knowing what is was or why he had it, she ran to him and asked.
It was a picture from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. He has been sent there to help survivors after United States forces took control of the camp April 11, 1945. There were 21,000 people found there in the worst of conditions.
Davis’ father told her it was a picture of tyranny and he kept it to remind him of why so many of his buddies died fighting that war.
“I knew enough as a child I needed to remember that word (tyranny), that experience,” Davis said, as she reminded the crowd that tyranny is still being fought today.
Then she told how one day, while cleaning her father’s bookshelves, she found a copy of Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf. Again she ran to her father to ask a question, this time, “why?” would he have such a book.
His answer was just as defining as the Buchenwald picture. He told Davis, “I am a free speech absolutist.”
He explained how he hated the words in Hitler’s book, but he hated censorship worse, because “censorship brings tyranny.”
“He said censorship is the extreme of what happens when tyranny takes hold,” Davis said, as the points were connected between Buchenwald and censorship.
Telling a story about her mother, taken from For The Boys, The War Story of a Combat Nurse in Patton’s Third Army, Davis told how there are times a person has to “dig deep and find moral courage.”
She told her mother’s memory of how a young soldier was desperately in need of plasma. He would die without it. Her mother was told there was none. She went herself to look in the blown apart supply room.
There she found plasma, but it was marked “colored.” Army regulations