Just discovered a photograph that shows that my Grandfather played a part in liberating a concentration camp where a massacre was ongoing in the last weeks of WW2. I know that he saw some shit in that conflict, but nothing quite as messed up as that. Lest we forget, right?
o_o Wow... did he ever talk about his experiences in the war? At least the more sanitary ones? I could certainly understand why he would clam up about that sort of thing. I'm pretty sure my grandfather experienced some traumatising things during the war(s), not that I have any detailed photos/stories to investigate, sadly. I don't really know that side of the family, given that they live almost on the other side of the world.
He did not like to talk about things much, and he died many years ago some time before I was 10. He did talk with my dad about some things which we have discussed over the years, including his involvement in D-Day (he led a team who operated a
Bofors Gun, and was driving the truck pulling the gun on a trailer. The trailer hit what he thinks was a buried 2000 lb bomb, wiping most of his squad and the gun, so he drove the truck up and down the beach offering cover and recovering the wounded), and operation Market Garden (when cut off behind enemy lines somewhere in the Netherlands, he passed himself off as a Dutch shopkeeper, telling a handful of German soldiers who asked him where the soldiers they were looking for were hiding that they were "Niet in de winkel - proberen in de kelder" / "not in the shop, try in the cellar". He then apparently dropped a few grenades in after them before barricading the door and running outta there, making it back to Allied lines by morning). I already knew he was some kind of "made from granite" hard man, but finding this out today hit me quite hard.
His wife, my Gran, was a font of crazy war stories. She was a nurse assigned to work in wards and hospitals where wounded PoW's were treated. She was seconded to one of the MI's, and was charged with getting as much valuable intel from the captured enemy as possible. She used this to her advantage of course, wrapping poor wounded men around her fingers.