The young soldier beside me reminds me so much of myself when I was his age. When he came up to me after the Remembrance Day ceremony and asked to talk with me, I was glad to do it. He pushed me in my wheelchair to the park bench in silence. I hate the damn chair, but my legs just don’t work the way they used too. As soon as we settle, we dive into conversation. We exchange stories of our experiences, not necessarily of battles, but of lighter topics, like why we joined the military and differences of the wars we fought in. He leans into the conversation, truly interested in what I have to say.

When I was a young man like him, World War II started and I found myself thrown into the turbulence of the war. I saw horrors no man should have to see in a life time in matter of months. But in the beginning I was excited, proud to be able to serve my country, much like the young man beside me. He has a long life ahead of him and many things he has not yet seen, but I can tell he is proud of what he is doing. Though the war I fought in was much different than the war he is fighting, there are still similarities in our experiences.

Our conversation takes a shift when he asks me if there was anything specifically in the war that had a big impact on me. Flashes of the battles ran through my head, of watching my friends die right before my eyes, the feeling of pure terror coursing through my veins when it looked like we were losing a battle. Then my mind settled on the image of concentration camps we liberated. I had never seen such horrific conditions for living, if you could call it that. The people that we found alive where ravished by hunger and bruises and disease, so weak they could barely even walk. There were even children among them, and you could see in their eyes the terror that had been their lives for so long. We gave them food upon our arrival and the children embraced us, calling us their heroes. Then we saw how the Nazi’s we killing them – there were the gas showers, the crematoriums that they would burn the corpses in, and the  trenches filled by hundreds of dead bodies. Though I had seen so much death before we made it there, this was different. These were civilians, innocent people, even children, slaughtered because of things about themselves they had no control over or couldn’t change. It made me sick to my stomach and I had to take a moment to compose myself. Never before had I seen such horrifying human suffering and those images have never left my mind…

I’m reluctant to bring this up to the young soldier. Until now our conversation had been light hearted and I don’t really want to talk about these horrors. I hadn’t talked about this in years, scared of the feeling it would bring back. But I must do this. I can see the curiosity in his expression, patiently waiting for my reply, and I realize that I need to get this story out to at least one soul, and who better to than a soldier who has seen horrors himself?