A Piece of History

(I am finishing (finally) a book on my grampa, Andrew Slack. This is a small sampling.)

When you hear of World War 2, the first thing that jumps out in most minds is the Holocaust, and maybe the liberators that had the gut-wrenching task of cleaning the horrifying scene left in the Nazi camps. What doesn’t come to mind as quickly - or at all unless reminded - are the soldiers that fought. The soldiers that risked their lives in a global war, the soldiers that were captured, injured or killed.

Many years ago, my grandfather - one of those mostly forgotten soldiers - brought up the question of why his generation rarely talked about their experiences. Our entire family had, at one point or another, asked him to tell his story. We knew the sacrifice that he had made and seen others make, and wanted to know so we could share with others. His answer was that the fighting soldiers felt so insignificant. There were 10 million troops, mostly young kids barely out of high school, that what was just one persons experience out of all of that?

I first dove into his war history as a senior in high school. I don’t remember the exact assignment, but it was for my American History class that I wrote a report on him. (I got an A+, by the way!) I sat him down and asked him to please tell me something of his time in the Army. I knew that, while he may have thought of himself as just one in 10 million, most of those 10 million lost their lives in the war and the ones that did survive were dying one-by-one, taking their experience to the grave.

I have seen a shift in the American public since then. We are realizing that the contributions - sometimes in the form of a life - they made all those many decades ago need to be remembered. The heroes forgotten in the horror of the Holocaust. While I would never even think of diminishing that (the pictures shown from time to time of the camps bring me to tears and make me sick to my stomach), the other stories are just as important. Someone’s father or brother or husband or son gave so much to end that atrocity and they should be remembered. My children will never know their great-grandfather. My daughter was a toddler and my son not born when he passed away. But I hope to pass on his legacy to them and the others in their generation and beyond by telling his story.