I applaud your article, “Liberators’ PTSD Now Coming Into Sharper View” (June 6), discussing the much overlooked trauma of the WWII liberators of the Nazi concentration camps.
My 2011 book, “Gated Grief: The Daughter of a GI Concentration Camp Liberator,” was the first to discuss at length the trauma that followed the American liberators home and how it shaped not only their postwar lives but those of their children. There are many implications to the fact that, according to my own calculations, over 300,000 Americans GIs witnessed the camps. It is important that children of these liberators recognize the role their veteran parents played in liberating the prisoners of the camps and how the trauma became a part of their own psyches. We children of liberators can and must be part of the next generation to carry forward our parents’ testimony.
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