Soon, there will be no living witnesses to that moment.
That makes historical memory even more important.
We cannot personally ask them what they saw.
We cannot sit beside them and hear their voices.
We cannot shake their hands.
We cannot ask what they thought when the American soldiers arrived.
But we can preserve their testimony.
We can study the documents.
We can visit the memorial sites.
We can teach the next generation.
And we can remember.
Liberation was a beginning, not an ending
On April 11, 1945, American troops liberated Mittelbau-Dora.
But the story did not end that day.
For the survivors, freedom meant beginning again.
Some needed medical treatment.
Some needed to find relatives.
Some needed to discover whether their homes still existed.
Some had to learn how to live without the structure of imprisonment.
And some died before they could experience much of the freedom they had fought so desperately to reach.
