They survived the worst battles of the war, but died from the new coronavirus.

In 1945, James Leach Miller returned from World War II. And fell silent. He did not tell his wife about the war during the 64 years of marriage.

The man folded his medal uniform and carried it to the basement. Only Elder J.L. Miller would sometimes take out his clothes to play with, like in war.

He started working as a firefighter. On Sundays, he walked to church. He did not complain about anything.

“It just came to our attention then. It just said that times were not good, that there were better times. It didn’t expand,” says his son Michael about his father.

Chaos is in mourning

Miller was already seventy years old when he began to gradually tell Michael, an engineer in the US Air Force. USA, on the landing on Omaha Beach in Normandy in 1944.

“Fragments appeared,” says Michael, remembering the explosion of a deafening bomb, the mist covering his eyes almost daily, trapping Nazi planes, dust balls, and dirt.

The man once offered his father a trip to Normandy with other American WWII veterans, but Miller declined. He just said, “I was there once.”

That generation did not transmit its problems. My father only said that times were not good, that there were better. It did not expand.

This story is not without reason. Miller, 96, who survived at least the bloodiest battle of World War II for Americans, died of complications from coronavirus on March 30 in Holocaust homes.

Today, COVID-19 infection is estimated to have invaded the homes of more than 40 war veterans in more than 20 US states. At least 300 people who have been confirmed infected with the new coronavirus have died in those care homes.

And the situation in the Holocaust, where 247 beds have been installed for life and where J.L. Miller has lived for the past five years, was so chaotic that the children of the deceased simply cannot help but complain.

The investigation has already begun.

During his last weekend, J.L. Miller allowed himself to be weak and to breathe heavily, as two of his daughters prayed over the phone to give the nurse the morph or atropine for the old man.

“But she said she couldn’t and started crying,” James’s daughter Linda McKee recalled. “There was no one to lead.”

Michael Miller was on duty in his father’s bed and did what he could, trying to moisten his lips with a sponge that he had hit on a wooden stick. According to McKee later, “by this time he was already suffocating and died without any help.”

Massachusetts will remember what happened at the Holocaust Soldiers Home for a long time. There was a lack of protective equipment and personnel, and the administration did not separate those infected with coronavirus from other ancestors: the infection spread suddenly.

At the end of March, the institution housed 210 older people. 89 are now dead and 74 of the latter were infected with coronavirus. In total, three-quarters of the residents of these residences became infected.

Several investigations are already underway, and several are aimed at determining whether public officials can be prosecuted or prosecuted.

Voted for savings

But state voters are already debating whether they made the mistake of choosing the moderate but very frugal Republican and who cut public spending Charlie Baker in 2015 as governor of Massachusetts.

The houses of the Holocaust soldiers are not private, they belong to the state. But because of the savings, there is a chronic shortage of workers here, and those who work are forced to work double shifts.

The previous head of the institution resigned in 2015 and declared that it was impossible to provide safe care in these homes, with very little money.

Most importantly, all of these problems were known before the coronavirus arrived in Massachusetts in the spring, says Erin O’Brien, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

“All these ordinary people in the state are now furious. There’s no way I disagree with them, but veterans aid programs need funding.” If you vote for the state savings, you are now seeing the consequences, ” said my teacher.

H. Goering saved

And there were more stories of the houses of the Holocaust soldiers in the war. These houses were established shortly after World War II, when Americans involved in Euro-Pacific operations began to return to Massachusetts.

It was to these shocked men that then-Governor Paul Dever, who had participated in the war, named the House of the Holocaust Soldiers. There were still several veterans who had seen the battles of World War II.

Here’s Emilio DiPalma, who was taken by a coronavirus in April, protecting Herman Goering during the Nuremberg War Crime Protocol, who had contributed greatly to the massacre of Nazis in the camps.

Samok Lococo, a retired postman who lived with the new coronavirus and died on April 16, lived in the Holocaust. He served in the US forces in the South Pacific and said he feared the suicide of the Japanese pilots, the kamikazes.

Emilio DiPalma, who was taken by a coronavirus in April, protected Herman Goering during the Nuremberg War Crimes Protocol, who had contributed greatly to the massacre of Nazis in the camps.

It is true that Lococo belonged to a group of soldiers who sailed to rescue the pilots when their planes crashed into the sea. In an interview, he recounted how he once looked directly into the face of a frightened but alive pilot.

“The Japanese were taught that Americans were very cruel, so they were probably afraid of us.” In English, she repeated that we would kill him. But we get him out of the water, bandage the wounds, and take him to the aircraft carrier. We treat that pilot like a king, “Lococo said in an interview.

Those who denied the Holocaust were angry.

And J.L. Miller, as her son remembers, once showed emotions, however, when she learned about 30 years ago that there are many people in the world who deny the Holocaust.

“My father was never angry about anything, but then he was very angry. It was as if someone had pressed a button, “recalled his son Michael.

Her father allegedly took out a box of old photos and went with her to a small Holocaust museum in Springfield. Finally, the photos were found at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. USA In Washington.

In those photos, human bodies lie in the Nordhausen concentration camp. Train carriages carrying Jews. Human bones. Ovens

“I wanted humanity to remember what was happening. After hearing that there were those who said there were no atrocities, he wanted to show that they really were, “said Michael Miller.