Page 10 - Aerotech News and Review 5-20-16

DAD, from 8

thankful that it has happened at last … and we others, with crematoria belching smoke as the blood spilling under the door, and a scream, “Ah his life after that most glorious of days, VE Day.
can celebrate it in thought together, signed Carl Americans arrived to railroad cars and streets of .. h .. h.. h!” peeling forth, and what looks like the It is 71 years later, and as William Faulker
corpses. Filmmaker George Stevens, who would smoke of the camp puffing through the open door.
But my father’s time in World War II was not direct post-war classics as “Shane,” and James noted once about the Deep South, “The past isn’t
yet done. As he shared with his mother, every unit Dean’s final film, “Giant,” was traumatized at In one cartoon, my father’s war was expressed. dead … it isn’t even past.” It is as close as a dusty
that participated in the European Theater of Op- Dachau, saying he never, until then, understood And that was the part of the war that came into box in a garage.
erations was clamoring for its own documentary what humans were capable of doing to one an-
footage. And many were anxious over plans for other. My mother said my father’s experience was
the invasion of Japan, my father knew he would similar. He was among the film team who edited
be busy in Europe. He wrote he would not be a record that would be prepared for the coming
going home immediately, because all the combat Nuremberg war crimes trials that saw the worst of
soldiers with “points,” quite rightfully, would be the worst Nazis hung for crimes against humanity.
sent home first. The atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, ultimately, relieved the rest of the In the vicarious processing of raw, unedited
dread of invading Japan. film, my father found his war.

Sometime before my father died a quarter- In the dusty storage box, with his series of
century ago, at the age of 81 (he would be 105 light-hearted service cartoons I found a final
now), my mother, Charlotte, told me his work in drawing. The film unit’s C.O. was a regular Army
post VE-Europe was editing film taken during the officer named Grooney. From his cartoon, I wit-
liberation of Nazi concentration camps. nessed a place my father never spoke of. It was
the “Atrocity Room,” the film lab where 3908th
As the Red Army swept on to Berlin, Soviet Signal G.I.s edited Nazi concentration camp film.
troops liberated Auschwitz, Treblinka and oth-
er ovens of the Holocaust. If it was the Soviets The cartoon showed a door with the Nazi SS-
who discovered the biggest and most baleful of style “skull and bones” death’s head insignia.
Nazi death factories, American troops liberated
Dachau, the first camp that modeled for all the Satirically, the door has a sign placard hung on
it that says “The Late Grooney,” with a pool of

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