Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

by Daniel James Brown

Naked the Jews would seem human, he said. In their underwear they looked ridiculous. Better to shoot them that way, so as not to feel any remorse later.

So relevant to the world today. I had to stop reading when I hit this pragraph and just process for awhile.

Solly, watching from the bushes just six or seven feet away, his heart pounding, heard the sound of a baby wailing in the grave as the man began to shovel the dirt. It was then that he fully understood for the first time that in the eyes of the Germans who had come to Lithuania, and the Lithuanian nationalists who had joined forces with them, he was, at best, an animal to be hunted. It was as if someone had, at that moment, applied a hot branding iron to his young flesh.

the regular mass executions that the Germans called Aktions. In one of these, the Kinder Aktion of March 27 and 28, 1944, the SS systematically murdered twelve hundred children as police cars drove through the ghetto blaring music to mask the sound of mothers and fathers screaming.

On Monte Folgorito, in the Vosges forest, among the hills of Tuscany, at Monte Cassino, time and again they selflessly offered up their best selves. And the selves they offered up—the lives they put on the line—grew from both American and Japanese roots. Whether they lived or died in the endeavor, they reminded us yet again that we Americans are all composed of varied stuff, a multitude of backgrounds and identities forged together in the furnace of our national tribulations and triumphs.