I Left Auschwitz a Year Ago, but It Hasn't Left Me

I owe you an apology.

I didn't realize how much stuff binge-watching Band of Brothers would churn up. I thought I was revisiting one of the finest World War II shows ever made. Then I reached Episode 9, "Why We Fight," and suddenly I wasn't sitting at home watching Easy Company anymore.

I was back at Auschwitz in late September 2025.

I could feel the place again. The barracks, the photographs, and the belongings stolen from people who arrived carrying whatever small hope they had left. Most of all, I remembered the air. I wrote afterward that it felt different inside Auschwitz, almost as though the air itself remembered.

And then something surprised me.

I felt the anger again. Not the memory of anger, but the anger itself.

Almost exactly a year ago, I tried to explain what Auschwitz had done to me. I called the experience "a quiet explosion rocking the foundation of my soul." I wrote about the shoes, suitcases, human hair, and photographs. I wrote about standing where murder had been organized, scheduled, documented, and turned into an industry.

I wrote about rage because sadness wasn't enough.

I suppose I expected time to soften some of it. Life resumed after my wife, two friends, and I came home. There was work to do, bills to pay, dogs to feed, people to love, and all those wonderfully ordinary things that consume a life.

A year passed.

Then a television episode reached across eight decades and an ocean and pulled me straight back through those gates.

"Why We Fight" depicts Easy Company encountering a concentration camp near Landsberg, Germany. The episode draws from Kaufering IV, part of the Dachau concentration camp system. The 12th Armored Division reached Kaufering IV on April 27, 1945. Soldiers of the 101st Airborne arrived the following day.

American troops found roughly 500 dead prisoners. The SS had evacuated many prisoners as American forces approached. Those too sick or weak to leave faced one final act of barbarism: barracks containing prisoners were set on fire.

Think about the men who walked into that place.

They'd jump into Normandy under heavy German fire. They'd fought through Holland. They froze at Bastogne. They watched friends die and carried wounded men from battlefields.

By April 1945, there couldn't have been much about death these young Americans hadn't seen.

Then they walked into a place for which combat had given them no vocabulary.

Aaron Eiferman of the 12th Armored Division wrote to his wife after encountering Kaufering. His description of the prisoners was devastatingly simple: "the living dead."

I've watched "Why We Fight" before. But I hadn't watched it since Auschwitz.

There's a difference now because I've walked through another gate. I've stood inside a barracks and looked at photos of people who once had jobs, families, birthdays, favorite foods, irritating habits, and plans for tomorrow.

Somebody decided those people weren't human anymore, and I think that's where my anger lives.

History has a way of becoming safer as it grows older. We put dates beneath photographs, build museums, and make documentaries. Eventually the people themselves risk disappearing behind numbers.

Six million Jews were murdered, along with millions of other victims who were persecuted and killed.

Numbers are necessary, but numbers can't cry. They can't tell you what somebody hoped to become. They can't show you the shoes someone expected to wear again.

Auschwitz can.

Maybe that's why "Why We Fight" hit me so hard this time. For years, I'd watched actors portraying American soldiers encountering something incomprehensible.

Now I've stood where the incomprehensible actually happened. And somewhere during that episode, its title stopped being the name of a television show.

Why We Fight.

Those men had crossed an ocean, jumped from airplanes, climbed beaches, frozen in foxholes, buried friends, and fought their way across Europe without knowing that places such as Kaufering existed just over the horizon.

Then they opened the gates, revealing the answer.

Almost exactly a year ago, I walked through the gates of Auschwitz carrying an anger I couldn't fully explain. I flew home; life continued; seasons changed, and Auschwitz became somewhere I'd visited last year.

Or so I thought. Then I rewatched Band of Brothers. The gates opened again, but so did the anger. I left
Auschwitz a year ago, but it hasn't left me. And after watching "Why We Fight" again, I'm beginning to understand something I couldn't have understood when I wrote about Auschwitz last September.

I'm simply unsure that I want it to.

If you value stories that remember where we've been, what it cost, and why remembering still matters, please consider joining PJ Media VIP. Right now, you can save 60% with promo code FIGHT. Your support keeps independent voices and stories like this alive.