THE DAY OF THE AMERICANS

This is another personal retrospective of the Dachau extermination camp where several hundred thousand were gassed and cremated. Gun was an inmate but also a journalist, the lone Turk at the camp who was apparently betrayed by a fellow Turk in Budapest in 1943. He never reveals what his presumed crime was. His story here is told from the point of view of the day of liberation by the American army's 45th Division. To the internees, the Americans appeared out of storybooks, open-shirted with dangling cigarettes and tilted helmets. However, when they discovered thousands of emaciated corpses littering the camp, they executed on sight some three hundred SS guards. Gun does dispel the notion that Dachau was maintained only for the Jews: everybody went up ""the chimney"" including Nazi generals. The book adds further annals of sheer horror to the documentary literature about Dachau. None of them have been willingly read.