Again, thoughts to my Dad. Today is the 64th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, into which my Dad walked as one of the first liberators. He told me the SS had evancuated about 30 min. before they arrived. If someone could have told him he would live another 49 years exactly (yesterday was the 15th anniversary of his death), how would he have reacted? No man knows the years that are given to him. On that evening before Buchenwald, which would mark my Dad I believe, he could not have known that he would survive another month of combat (he narrowly escaped death in Aachen), view the inside of Hitler's bunker in Berlin, be exempted from transfer to the Pacific theatre by Hiroshima, come home, marry his beloved Jo, work for the Army for the rest of his career in Washington D.C., have a son, retire to watch the President go down (Watergate--Dad spent his first year of retirement glued to the television for the hearings), move to St. Petersburg where he lived as a young teen for a year, and die of kidney failure in that town in 1997? He was given a good life, while those in Buchenwald were deprived of it.