As the daughter of a man who escaped from a French POW camp, let me say with all the conviction I can muster, Bite Me Loooooooosers.
CHICAGO—Charles T. Payne was 20 years old and, like any good Midwesterner, he knew how to listen.
He was making conversation, in pieced-together English and German, with a freed prisoner of Ohrdruf, the Nazi work camp Payne's infantry division had just liberated at the end of World War II.
"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, told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday as, on the other side of the world, his great-nephew, Barack Obama, prepared to visit the Yad Vashem national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Helping liberate Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, in April 1945 was Payne's first close brush with history.
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In May, Obama mentioned "Uncle Charlie" at a meeting with veterans but mistakenly said Payne had helped liberate Auschwitz, when he should have said Buchenwald. Bloggers seized on the error and the Republican Party demanded an explanation.
Obama's campaign corrected the mistake the next day. Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz as they marched across Poland in January 1945.
Payne, with an Obama button pinned to his shirt, told the AP he was "truly astonished" by the attention paid to Obama's flub. The brother of Obama's maternal grandmother, Payne figures Obama heard the story wrong from his grandparents, "whose grasp of geography wasn't always the firmest." He said at the time he asked friends if he should "try to set the record straight," but that they advised him to ignore it.
Payne said he didn't want to say anything to embarrass the Obama campaign and minimized his role in the liberation of Ohrdruf.
"I have no heroic story to tell," he said. "I was just there."
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