Op-Ed: ‘It could happen here’
April 4, 2025 | By Sarah Page 80 years ago today was an important day in my family's history. Ohrdruf work camp, a satellite camp of Buchenwald in Germany, was liberated.
The author’s father, John Calvin Page, in Centerville, Vermont, circa 1943. Family photo
The men who liberated the camp that day, and the men who witnessed the camp the next day, had no idea of the horrors they would encounter and, at any rate, there is no way to prepare the mind for such horrors.
The next day my father and everyone with whom he had fought the war, except the cooks who stayed behind to make meals for the men, were taken to the site to act as witnesses. They were not prepared for what they would see, and as they headed there they felt they were going off on holiday.
They were at the camp for about four hours. And then they returned for dinner and were told to go about their duties. They were expected to get on with their day, but my father was never the same again. The last time he spoke of this to me he was in his late eighties and weeping about what he saw that day as though he was there.
My father told me about what he saw because he knew he was getting old, that his generation would soon pass from the world, and there were people who were saying that what he witnessed that day was a lie. He asked me to tell my students about what he saw, to make sure they knew it happened, that it was true. He wanted me to tell everyone. He wanted me to tell you that it was true.
My father wanted you to know:
He saw tiers of bunks in bunkhouses four tiers high, each bunk with not enough room to sit up in the bunk. He saw the bodies of emaciated skeletal men, young men – several men to a bunk – lying in those beds with a single bullet hole in each of their heads.
He saw bodies being carried out of the bunkhouse by civilians from town who had been pressed to work, forced to witness what had been happening in their town. He saw bodies being bulldozed into a huge pit and burned.
He wanted you to know:
The men at that camp had been forced to dig rock from a huge hole in the earth using picks and shovels from dawn to dusk while starving to death and, when they could dig no longer, they were shot. The men my father saw in those bunks were the most recent arrivals, and the Germans had been thorough in making sure that none of them survived.
The mayor of the town went home the night of the liberation after being forced to walk through the camp and shot himself.
My father wanted you to know that the men he saw in the bunks were just like him. They were young. They had been strong. And they were worked almost to death before they were dispatched from the earth as though they were nothing.
He wanted you to know that they could be you.
He wanted you to know that the guards who shot those men were ordinary people just like him. They were the sons of soldiers, and they went to war to honorably serve the country that they loved. Instead, they found themselves monsters, conforming to the circumstances in which they found themselves.
He wanted you to know that they could be you.
He wanted you to know that you could be the victim and you could be the murderer. Because real, living, breathing human beings were both.
He wanted you to know that this was done under the guise of law. That these were state-sanctioned acts, the power and will of the most civilized country in Europe – a fallen democracy – put into action.
He wanted you to know that what happened there could happen anywhere.
He wanted you to know that it could happen here.
Sarah Page is the oldest daughter of John Calvin Page, originally of Johnson and Centerville, Vermont. He went on to work as the UVM County Agricultural Extension Agent for Bennington County and represented Bennington in both the Vermont House and Senate. A Duxbury resident, Sarah is retired from a 30-year teaching career at Harwood.