World War II veteran shares horrors of war with students
“I try to make it real to them; I try to tell them what it was like,” [Clifford] Park says. Sitting in the living room of his apartment, he flips through a file folder full of photos from Mittelbau Dora, the concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany, that the Timberwolf soldiers [his division] liberated in April 1945.
Thousands died at Mittelbau Dora, many of them Russian and Polish slave laborers, Jewish and non-Jewish, who toiled underground digging tunnels for the Nazis’ secret rocket program.
“They know about Iraq, they know what happened with Saddam Hussein,” Park says, “but they have no idea the magnitude of what happened in World War II. They have nothing to compare it to.”
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He rejoined his unit at Nordhausen in April, just after the Timberwolves had liberated the camp, finding about 5,000 corpses and many prisoners who were nearly starved to death.
“They looked like little kids playing dress-up, the way their clothes just hung off of them,” Park said of the camp survivors he encountered at Nordhausen. “They were nothing but skin and bones. Grown men who weighed 75, 80 pounds. Seeing men in that condition sticks with you.”
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“I am going to do this as long as I can, as long as I can get up and get around,” Park says of his work with young people. “It’s a story that needs to be told.”
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