I was just reminded by Meryl that today is the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It's a good muse for a post, but it's a bit late now. In the extended entry is a re-post of my entry from two years ago. I can't write anything like that but now and again, anyway.

Burnt Offerings

Today is a day of solemn heroism.

On this day in 1945, soldiers of the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz death camp. There were only a few thousand prisoners left in the camp at that time, the rest (about 56,000) having been marched out by the Nazis in a mad rush west to mask their crime and finish their work.

I won't try, of course, to put to words in a simple blog post the things that went on in places like that. Others have done it far better than I could in both book and film.

But the reader may indulge me in a few thoughts.

For any person of conscience...of moral fiber...there must be in any life a desire to find greater meaning. A desire to act and achieve for the self, and also to do good for the world - to leave the earth a little bit better place than what we found it.

I can think of no greater deed, no quicker path to heaven, no more everlasting salve upon the soul of a man that must last until the end of his days than having the privilege of being the liberator of a death camp. It is...a perfect good.

In Band of Brothers, the most excellent mini-series about the 101st Airborne Division in WW2, a stand-out moment for me in a story with no weak sequences must be Episode 9 - "Why We Fight." That is the moment when the boys come out of the woods and find the concentration camp.

It stirs emotion in me, a strong one...I am jealous.

I have never served in the military - never marched with Martin Luther King, likely never will invent anything of importance, defend an innocent man accused of a capital offense, star in an inspiring film, nor write a great work. I must content myself with smaller philosophies as it were - respect the good, admire the heroic, ponder right and wrong - to teach it and influence where I can - mostly a neatly cloistered sphere in my direct surround. Supporting cast to an often greater humanity.

Yet here's the story of a bunch of guys who achieved true greatness - who, if there be anything approaching cosmic karma, have purchased enough indulgences to last three lifetimes. Not only did they have the privilege, those who lived, to liberate a continent from Nazism - achieve a victory on the grand scale - but they also did this so very personal thing. They opened the bars of a cage and let the sunlight in.

I cannot even put myself in their place. In my fantasy, I am the guy on the airplane that catches flak and explodes before I have a chance to jump, the guy who's parachute does not open, the one who catches a freak bullet the morning of the invasion and no one remembers for the closing credits.

I am Green.

From the stars, we can look down on the Earth, and imagine all the tiny people, and their petty wars, and their petty conflicts, and wonder why all those souls, who appear not even as ants to us floating up above, why they have to kill each other, why they must cause so much pain to one another when they are surrounded by so...much...beauty.

But then we remember...they kill each other, yes...but they...those tiny, tiny specks too minute for the eye to see...they save each other, too.

Your mental view shifted upward just now didn't it? You can imagine yourself in orbit above the earth, looking down at the view...like an astronaut.

January 27, 1967 is the day that three brave men, preparing to ride the tip of humanity's spear into the cosmos, the representatives of all of humanity's hopes and dreams for the future...died.

Edward H. White II, Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, and Roger B. Chaffee were locked in to their Apollo capsule with no way out for a live test countdown in preparation for a later orbit mission when something happened. It happened so fast they hardly had a chance to panic - if they even knew how. A flash fire swept the concentrated oxygen environment of their capsule and incinerated the three men in seconds, leaving carbonized metal, melted plastic and nylon and three empty places at the dinner table.

They were there - like the men who died so their buddies could go on to beat the Nazis and save the innocent from the ovens - for us, because of us, because we sent them - so that you and I now know what it looks like to peer down at the Earth from a distance. At the very least, we owe it to all of their memories to pause and think about the significance of their sacrifice.

A few days ago some pages from the in-flight diary of Colonel Ilan Ramon were miraculously found, having survived the enormous heat of re-entry and then almost just as amazingly being found by a person here on Earth before they could be swallowed up by the elements. So the man we so envied not so long before, who we sent to risk all for us, who looked down at the smallness of us here on Earth and marveled in wonder at what he saw, renewed, in some way, his connection with us even in death - as if to say, "Here, at least take this, from me, of what I did and saw.

Perhaps we're not so tiny after all.

It is so very rare for anything to survive the flames. But then, Ilan Ramon's mother was an Auschwitz survivor, after all.

So January 27 is a special day. A day of sacrifice and savior. A day when men gave the totality of themselves in a hope of touching the heavens not to leave us all behind, but to lift us all up with them...

...and it was a day of man's inhumanity redemed.