Character: Michael Davis, 42ND Infantry Division, U.S. Seventh Army
Setting: Liberating Dachau, April 30, 1945 looking out at what was the concentration camp, writing in a journal
Michael Davis is looking out at the people that they freed the day before. He is thinking. He is also writing in his journal.


How?!?! How could they have done this? How could any human being do this to another person for that matter? I see human upon human, just piled on top of one another as if they were trash waiting to be taken off to a dump.

These monsters! They do all of this and still they think that they are doing the right thing. They can look at this and say “What a good day’s work”. They can go home and eat and play with their children and laugh. They can go to sleep and not lose a wink of sleep over the fact that there are people here being tortured, starved and killed, for no reason, except that they are different. They are monsters, the lot of them.

(He looks around) I smell the smell of burned flesh. I am horrified that I am able to say that this doesn’t surprise me. The Nazi’s are devils on earth. Around the camp there are mounds of some sort. There are limbs sticking out of the mounds. It pains me to say this, but there is evidence that some of the victims were alive when this tragedy befell them.

We U.S. troops walk with high heads, I mean, we liberated the camp didn’t we? But we also find ourselves asking why not sooner. If we had been here a day sooner, scores of lives would have been saved.

The killing and torturing is bad and evil and cruel; but what hurts me the most to see, is that the Nazi’s not only beat and tortured these people, but that they robbed them of their free will. They robbed them of there sanity. They robbed them of their freedom. And on top of it all, they robbed them of life. What are standing before me are husks of the people they once were.

I see on some of them laugh lines, not used in millennia. I see fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. I see among me, people hanging on to life by a thread. My greatest hope is that I can help them renew that lost life; that I can help these people to laugh again.










Michael Davis,






April 30, 1945