Friends.
Entire communities.
Some had no home to return to.
Some had no family left.
The word “liberation” therefore carried two meanings.
The prisoners were free from the camp.
But they could never return to the world that had existed before.
The human beings behind the numbers
History often records numbers.
Thousands killed.
Thousands deported.
Thousands forced to work.
Thousands evacuated.
Those numbers are necessary.
They help us understand the scale of the crime.
But numbers can also become abstract.
A number does not tell you what a prisoner looked like.
It does not tell you what song they remembered from home.
It does not tell you the name of the person they were thinking about when they fell asleep.
It does not tell you what they dreamed of doing after the war.
Behind every number was a human being.
Someone had a name.
Someone had a family.
Someone had a childhood.
