What I’m Reading – The Boys in the Light

There are people on this planet who believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

For some, it’s simple denial. They can’t believe that a people who gave us Bach and Kant could commit something so horrible. Perhaps they see something inside themselves in the mirror of history, something that frightens them, and so they turn away.

For others, it’s deeper. It’s rooted in hate. They look at a people and blame them for the problems of the world. They’ll swear Hitler had the right idea. Or, they’ll say the entire thing was concocted, a massive conspiracy theory to claim something happened that never did.

Either way, I wonder what they would have thought if we could have beamed them onto a road in Germany in 1945. That’s when two skeletons, two young men, more dead than alive, stumbled out onto a roadway in front of American tanks. These two young men raised their hands, not in surrender, but more in supplication.

Would they have denied it?

I suspect the boys of Company D would have shot those people, run over them with their tanks, and then backed up just to make sure they got them.

And that’s where this book comes in.

It’s testimony that events like this happened. It’s the words of the people who were there.

It’s the men from America, taken from the Brooklyn diners and the Minnesota farms, and taken across an ocean to fight a war that most times, they had no clue what they were fighting for. But when D Company encountered Eddie and Mike, the two survivors of an industry designed to kill them, they figured out what they were fighting against.

And it’s the story of a family. Most of them are gone and exist only as ashes now. But the family survived. It’s the legacy of a father who taught two young men how to tough it out. It’s about the anxiety of facing each sunrise knowing your continued life was at the whim of someone who thought they could get an extra day’s work out of you.

It’s about communities destroyed, friendships strained to the breaking point, all because someone said you were the enemy.

But it’s also a story of the best America offers. They could easily have been ignored. Or simply left on the side of the road with a few rations.

But that’s not what happened.

These two kids, adrift in the world, washed up on the shore of an island of men who took them in and treated them as family. Until the end of the war and beyond, the men of Company D accepted them and treated them like brothers. They nursed them back to health and gave them purpose again.

And like family they’d become, they hunted each other down to be reunited.

I’m going to be 100% honest here. This book brought me to tears. More than once I felt the grief and the joy, and the need to fight back tears.

Nina Willner wrote an incredible book here. It preserves history and serves as a warning to us of what we can become and the terror of a future if we forget.