For much of her life, Dana Mitch carried her grandfather’s Holocaust story as something both known and distant. He had been arrested after Kristallnacht, sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, and later found a way out. Years afterward, he returned to Europe wearing an American uniform, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge against the very army that once held him prisoner. Dana heard these stories, but they felt like history that belonged to someone else.
That changed when she stood at Buchenwald herself. The barracks were gone, replaced by a vast expanse of gravel, but the silence spoke louder than any textbook ever could. She thought about her grandfather’s arrival in November 1938, when ten thousand Jewish men stood in freezing rain before there was even shelter to contain them. Some endured only days. Others never left. He was one of the few who survived. Walking that same ground, Dana felt for the first time the weight of what he had carried, and what she had inherited.
It wasn’t just the camp that came back to her, but the stories of what followed. Her grandfather built a life in America. He raised a family. He carried scars that were never fully spoken aloud, but that shaped every choice he made. Standing in Buchenwald, Dana realized that survival was not the end of his story but the beginning of hers. The visit did not answer every question, nor did it erase the distance of time. What it did was place her firmly in a lineage, a reminder that memory lives not only in books or interviews but in the ground itself.
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