Charles T. Payne in today’s Sun-Times:
Charles T. Payne was 20 years old when he learned about the Holocaust.
He was making conversation, in pieced-together English and German, with a freed prisoner of Ohrdruf, the Nazi work camp that Payne’s infantry division had just liberated in April 1945.
”With great difficulty we conversed and, if I got what it was he was telling me about, it was that the Germans had killed a million Jews and that the world didn’t really know this yet,” Payne, 83, said in an interview Tuesday as his great-nephew, Barack Obama, prepared to visit the Yad Vashem national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem today.
Helping liberate Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, was Payne’s first close brush with history.
In May, Obama mentioned ”Uncle Charlie” at a meeting with veterans but mistakenly said Payne had helped liberate Auschwitz. Bloggers seized on the error. Obama’s campaign corrected the mistake the next day. Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz in January 1945.
Payne said he was ”truly astonished” by the reaction to Obama’s error. Payne, whose sister was Obama’s maternal grandmother, figures Obama heard the story wrong from his grandparents. Payne said he didn’t want to say anything to embarrass his great-nephew, and he minimized his role in the liberation of Ohrdruf. ”I have no heroic story to tell,” he said. ”I was just there.”
I’m sure it’s just the liberal press covering for Obama….