WHERE THE BIRDS NEVER SING.

• Author: Sacco, Jack
• Position: THE WORLD YESTERDAY - Liberation of Dachau, Germany

WHEN I WAS A BOY, my father often told me stories about World War II. He had landed at Omaha Beach during the Normandy Invasion and had fought as a member of Gen. George Patton's famed Third Army. He was there when Gen. Patton delivered his inspiring speech to the troops just before D-Day. He was there during the frozen hell known as the Battle of the Bulge, when it seemed as if all was lost. He was there as the U.S. Army advanced through France and Germany, defeating the enemy and liberating towns and villages along the way.

I would listen with wide-eyed fascination as he recounted tales of how he and his fellow soldiers had fought their way across Europe. He showed me his medals, along with Nazi swords, daggers, and other artifacts he had collected as his battalion stormed through Europe en route to the ultimate victory, but there was more to the story than he could share with such a young boy.

One day, shortly after my 12th birthday, he said that he wanted to show me something that had occurred during the war. "This happened at a concentration camp," he told me, holding up a small photo album. "What's a concentration camp?" I asked, having never heard the term. "The Nazis were killing people there," he said, "but we made them stop."

Inside the album were the original photographs he and his buddies had taken on Sunday, April 29, 1945 -- the day they had liberated the notorious Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. The unspeakable horrors caught on film, he assured me, were only a glimpse of what he and his fellow liberators had witnessed the morning they entered the camp.

"I want to show you these for two reasons," he explained. "First, at some point in your life, someone will try to tell you that the Holocaust didn't really happen, but it did happen. I was there and I saw it. Second, I want you to never let anything like this happen again."

My father, Joe Sacco, was the only son of Sicilian immigrants. In 1942, he worked on the family farm in Birmingham, Ala., and, like many of the young soldiers of World War II, he never had been away from home before being drafted, nor held a weapon more powerful than a BB gun. He never had encountered violence more intense than a schoolyard fight--and the first beach he ever saw was Omaha Beach.

However, it neither was Normandy, nor the Battle of the Bulge, nor the months of combat through Germany that would bring tears to his eyes decades later. It was the memory of what he had witnessed when he entered the gates of Dachau.

"We fell silent as we entered the camp," he said. "The smell that had caught our attention as we had...