Telling Others

Caption for "A living deadman"

This is the Buchy family--all underground for the Maquis and savers of American lives

View from a stretcher on a plane

Crawford: Did you write home or say anything to your folks about what you'd seen at Buchenwald?

Wile: I sent all these pictures home, and I sent some to the newspapers. I sent some to the News Tribune which was our hometown newspaper. I was disappointed in some of the responses that I got from my folks. I don't think--I didn't feel--as if they placed the grave thoughts about how this happened or why it happened that I placed on it--which goes to show you that a picture is very descriptive, but there is a lot left out. If you don't experience it first hand, the picture can only cover so much. It can only imply. It's not the territory, it's only the map.

Crawford: Were you married at that time?

Wile: I married just before I went over. I'd been married about three weeks when I went over.

Crawford: Did you tell your wife about it when you came back?

Wile: I don't think I doted on it. I don't think she was inquisitive about any of it. She had one brother in the Marines in the Pacific, and they lived from day to day and wondered whether he was gonna come back. Then she said that she was very concerned about me when I was over there.

Crawford: It's a fascinating pattern that we're seeing. Some people just put the photos away and don't even let their minds think about it. Others wanted the world to see what had happened.

Wile: When I got to Paris, I had these pictures with me in the hospital. There I met a lady by the name of Madame Susan Buchy. Her husband, M. Buchy, had printed the French Underground Paper, and she was a Grey Lady. I was very surly in the hospital, but she persisted and was very kind and invited me to her home. She wanted me to bring these pictures and show them to her husband. I didn't realize at this time the contribution that this family had made to the war. They--including their little boy, seven, and their little girl, nine, at the time--had saved seventeen American and Allied Flyers.

M. Buchy had a party, and she particularly wanted me to come to this party and bring these pictures because there was a Swedish salesman there that had been selling material to the Germans--copper in particular, I think it was--and he would have none of this concentration camp stuff. He said it never happened, and so she wanted me to shove these pictures up in his face. I can remember her absolute distaste for this person and her determination in every way to rub it in that he had done wrong, that he was not neutral as he claimed, and that Sweden was more guilty than France was in letting Germany overrun them. So, at this party in her apartment--I had these pictures in a pocket secretary, like I always have carried them--I whipped them out and said, "What do you think of these?" He said, "What are these?" And I said, "These are the pictures I took in Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Weimar, Germany," and looked him in the eye. He says, "Well, you could have taken those in America." So, I didn't beat him to death or anything. That's exactly what his answer had to be. It could be nothing else, see, unless you were to drag him by the scruff of the neck and take him back there and show it to him.