Emil Landau visited Mountain Valley High School teenagers Wednesday to talk about his own teen years.

He spent them on crematory duty at Auschwitz, assigned to put bodies through the furnace. Including the body of his own father.

Landau, who also spent time at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, showed students the numerical tattoo on his left arm, a stamp of his ancestry and a lingering reminder of the terror of war.

Although these students have likely read about World War II and have a good understanding of the Holocaust, Landau’s presentation made real the horror of Hitler’s regime.

The immediacy of news reports out of Iraq are making real the horror of Saddam’s regime, affirming the military’s decision to embed journalists.

Afraid of being left alone in Basra, Iraqi troops are shooting civilians who are fleeing the city. The troops understand the coalition’s hesitation to bomb areas where civilians are known to be, so the troops are using deadly threat to keep civilians inside city boundaries. If they don’t, and the coalition knows only military forces remain behind, there’s nothing to stop full-out attack.

It’s cowardly and inhumane for troops to guard their own safety by killing innocents.

Unlike World War II, when news about the Holocaust was slow to surface, this atrocity is being shown in real time.

What we are seeing on television and reading in newspapers will eventually be summarized in textbooks, and 50 years hence victims of war – like Emil Landau – will talk to schoolchildren about their experiences.

The military’s decision to embed hundreds of journalists with the troops has been criticized, and there is some danger familiarity will develop between the troops and the media, especially since journalists are dependent on the military for protection. The real time news reports are worth that risk.

Part of the reason the military was so agreeable to the arrangement was so the public will get to see action, not just burned out tanks and broken bodies in the aftermath of conflict. This desire to get an accurate picture, which may defend the military against accusations of war crimes, may actually shorten the conflict.

There is absolutely no way to predict how long Operation Iraqi Freedom will last. President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair have suggested it will be months, followed by years of rebuilding. It is not a stretch to suggest that the immediacy of the images and the instantaneous dissemination of information exposing wartime atrocities – like the shooting of civilians in Basra – will raise public ire and cement world opinion against Iraq in support of coalition forces.

It is an advantage not afforded Emil Landau and other victims of the Holocaust.
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