The Book

The Dachau Liberator—Early Fall 2008

If you hadn’t shown me these photos, I wouldn’t believe it. It’s truly unbelievable.”

Jimmy Gentry pored over rare pictures and kept shaking his head. As one of the American soldiers who liberated Dachau, the infamous German concentration camp, on April 29, 1945, he reminded me of many World War II soldiers who came home—strong, stoic, and sad. Today he was looking at something he’d never imagined: pictures of Italian concentra­tion camps full of Jewish people who survived the Holocaust. He simply could not believe the difference between what he witnessed in Dachau and what he was seeing in these pictures of the Italian camps.

“The first thing I notice about these people is that they’re not wearing rags of striped clothes; the clothes these people are wearing are nice, like clothes the men wore back home in Franklin at the time. They’re well-dressed—jackets, ties. Not what I saw in Dachau, no ma’am.” Jimmy shook his head before continuing.

“These people are fleshy, not like the walking dead I saw in Dachau. They look well-kept. Nothing like the ones I saw in Germany—with those eyes—people with haunting eyes.”As we sat in a sunny garden house on Jimmy’s Tennessee farm that crisp fall day, Jimmy paused at his memory of the haunting eyes, and a shadow crossed his face. He continued to look at my photos of an Italy he still could not imagine.

“I see children here,” he said, pointing. “There were no children in Dachau. These children look well-cared for and look, here, they were in school? A piano and a concert? No, nothing like this in Dachau.”

I asked him if he’d known there were Jews interned in Italy during the war.

“I didn’t,” he replied, “and I don’t know why I haven’t heard about it. I can’t believe Italy treated the Jews in their internment camps so well. It doesn’t make any sense, because Italy and Mussolini were allied with Hitler for most of the war.”

The fact that someone like Jimmy wasn’t aware of this didn’t make sense to me either, and that’s why I’ve been researching the story since the day I first discovered it. For forty years Jimmy had not been able to speak about his World War II experience of walking into the German concentration camp and seeing the human tragedy there. But twenty years ago he looked into the eyes of a Dachau survivor who asked Jimmy to share his story with others. “When you die,” explained the man, “nobody will know anything about what happened.” Jimmy understood. “After that, I had to tell others,” he said. So in 1986 he began speaking about his experiences and has con­tinued ever since. In October 2007, Jimmy traveled back to Dachau and recalled the unforgettable horrors he saw upon entering the camp: the skeletal figures that had been human beings; the filth; the death and destruction. His recent visit to Dachau made the contrast he was seeing in these pictures all the more poignant.

On that fall day in 2008, Jimmy looked directly into my eyes and said, “Tell this story. It is a story of goodness amidst evil. You must tell this story. If you don’t, who will?”