Senator Obama mixed up the names of two concentration camps. He said his relative liberated Auschwitz when instead it was a part of Buchenwald.
Information about Buchenwald, including personal testimonies, photos, maps, and overview information is available from the Holocaust museum here http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lan g=en&ModuleId=10006131
Some on this site have claimed that this was no mix-up, that somehow it was calculated since, the argument goes, Jews would have been more sympathetic to Obama if the camp was Auschwitz, purportedly because that camp is more well-known.
I am a Jew who has relatives who were killed in the Holocaust, with a cousin who was born in a displaced person's camp following the time her parents spent hiding in the woods of Poland, and with an uncle who fled Germany but could not convince the rest of his family to leave; they were murdered by the Nazi regime.
As a Jew, I have to say that no one in the Jewish community would find Obama more sympathetic if they thought Auschwitz was liberated by his great uncle than if they thought it was Buchenwald instead.
It's not like we only know about one of them. Their names are burned into our memories, along with so many more.
We know which parts of our family tree were literally burned to a crisp.
We know who hid in the forest or with rescuers.
We know who rose up and resisted.
We know who survived.
We know the many places where it happened. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka, Birkenau, Mauthausen, the list goes on and on.
We know which were work camps and which were death camps.
We know where the culling and medical experiments took place.
And we don't give a good G-d damn if someone mixed up a name.
We are grateful of that the camp Obama's great uncle was in was liberated by American troops.
We are grateful that Eisenhower and Patton visited that camp to see it for themselves.
We are grateful that Obama remembers.
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