In Bourke-White’s memoir, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly (1946), which was subtitled “A Report on the
Collapse of Hitler’s ‘ThousandYears,’” Bourke-White recalls the scene confronting the Allied troops who liberated
Buchenwald and her own agonized response:
There was an air of unreality about that April day in Weimar, a feeling to which I found myself stubbornly
clinging. I kept telling myself that I would believe the indescribably horrible sight in the courtyard before me
only when I had a chance to look at my own photographs. Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed
a slight barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me.
This whiteness had the fragile translucence of snow, and I wished that under the bright April sun which shone
from a clean blue sky it would all simply melt away. I longed for it to disappear, because while it was there I
was reminded that men actually had done this thing—men with arms and legs and eyes and hearts not so very
unlike our own.And it made me ashamed to be a member of the human race.
