The spring of 1945 … the global nightmare of a six-year war that had consumed over 60 million lives was drawing to a close. But one more nightmare had yet to be exposed to the light of day.

The Camps. The death camps, the concentration camps of the Nazi regime, were at last coming to light as the allies crossed the Rhine for the final death stroke against Hitlerism while the Soviets poured in from the east.

There had been plenty of rumors, a few feet of film, even some photographs, but nothing prepared us for the stomach-churning reality of man’s depravity in this darkest circle of hell.

It was a moment of leadership on the part of Gen. Eisenhower when he ordered as many as possible to witness what had been done. He ordered camera crews from the military and war correspondents to see it, to smell it, to film it. It’s reported that Gen. Patton, along with others, wept and vomited. Famed correspondents such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow carried memories of it across all their subsequent years as the elite of mainstream media, profoundly shaping their lives and reporting.

Before the war had even ended, Life magazines issues printed harrowing photos of the mountains of dead and the living skeletons who had barely survived, and in a pre-television age, newsreels carried the footage in theaters throughout America. And the memory of it, thanks to the orders of Eisenhower, became a permanent record for the generations to come. 

I’m an aging baby boomer, born into a secure, safe world in 1950. Growing up in a predominately Jewish community, I was, of course, aware. But it wasn’t until I was attending Catholic high school that a priest, who had witnessed the atrocities as a young combat soldier, showed us the real face of horror. It was a 16-mm 40-minute film shot by the Army in 1945. I’ll never forget the piles of human bodies being pushed into their graves with bulldozers while our priest tearfully told us what he himself had seen. We witnessed aging footage of ragged skeletal shadows of humanity being nursed by our soldiers, barely living men and women who collapsed and died in their hour of liberation, of gas ovens piled with skulls, and fields covered with decaying corpses.

I’ll never forget. It has stayed with me for over 50 years. No “reenactment” such as Band of Brothers or even Schindler’s List can fully capture the horror. I was only a witness to a film; when I visited Dachau, I did not smell that stench of death, except in my imagination. I was a remote witness, but at least I was a witness to truth.

During the summer of 2014 I became a witness again. In the days after ISIS went on its killing rampage, we were shown heavily censored footage of murder. I decided to probe deeper and, in short order, found some of the ISIS sites on the internet. I wanted to see the truth. I wish now I had not. It was barbarity out of some dark age of madness. It compelled me to write a novel about several schools being attacked in America by terrorists, based on the Beslan attack against a school in Russia where 250 children were murdered by Islamic terrorists. It has yet to happen here, but there is precious little assurance that it is not still in our future. And what ISIS did is still censored by the mainstream media, but at least some film leaked for those who needed to see so that they could write about it. 

On Oct. 7, 2023, I was once again a remote witness.

Watch the interviews with the members of ZAKA, a Jewish organization that is working to recover the broken and flame-charred remains of 1,400 Jewish dead and ensure their identification and proper burial according to ancient Jewish rite. ZAKA has women volunteers whose sole task is to clean and prepare the bodies of females, including infants, for burial. Look into the eyes of ZAKA volunteers to know the truth of what they are witnessing.

We did not censor to soft-focus the dead of 1945 in newsreels and Life. But we are censoring now. 

Why now?

In the last few weeks, we have seen well organized (and who helped organize these rallies?) marches, some of 100,000 or more, carrying their placards, chanting “from the river to the sea,” which means nothing less that the annihilation of Israel. We have members of Congress stating that Israel is the enemy and cheering on Hamas to further brutality. (RELATED: Will Jewish Support for Democrats Finally Fall?)

We did not censor it in 1945. Why are we censoring it now? Is it not time to show the truth of the barbaric nightmare of Hamas in all its shocking details? Hiding it only serves to perpetuate the lie that they are the victims. Place a photo of every slaughtered baby, of every family burned alive, into the faces of pro-Hamas protesters and their mouthpieces. Perhaps honoring the martyred dead is best served now by showing how they spent the last minutes of their tragic lives in blissful peace on a holy day of celebration that was then destroyed within minutes by the hands of a satanic cult of death.

Show the truth and confront those who march, in the streets and even in the halls of Congress, with the truth. 

If not, we will be but a short step to the lie that Eisenhower once feared: that it never even happened.

William R. Forstchen is a professor of history at Montreat College and the author of over 50 books, including the New York Times bestselling One Second After and his novel Day of Wrath, about an ISIS-style attack on America elementary schools.