This quote comes from World War II in HD, episode 10, "End Game."

In the documentary, Rockie Blunt gives an interview as a survivor of World War II. He was in the army and fought during the Battle of the Bulge. He served by looking for the dead, finding them, and burying them. He had a hard time with this job, and it isolated him. He says that the war turned him away from his Methodist religion and encouraged him to be an investigative reporter. He still has war flashbacks, and he struggles with the images he saw during the war.

Rockie Blunt was also there when Ohrdruf concentration camp was liberated. Ohrdruf was a sub-camp of Buchenwald in Germany. He writes that the concentration camps were beyond comprehension and were so bad that it's hard to fathom what they saw. He writes:

When you first come across it, you look but don't see. You listen but you don't hear. Your mind closes down. We talked to them and they would cry. They were beyond having a voice. Most of them tried to reach out and just touch you with a fingertip, anything just to ensure in their mind that what they were looking at the other side of the wire—us—was real.

This powerful statement tells us everything we need to know about what it was like to liberate the camps. The horror, the sadness, and the gravity of the event. Based on Rockie's time in the army, and as a self-described loner who had to find and tag American bodies, I think that by saying, "You listen but you don't hear," he is talking about how soldiers had to dissociate themselves from the event. It's things like liberating the camps that will haunt them forever, but the act of seeing men, women, and children in these conditions, crying out for help, was too much to bear. You see the conditions, but you don't see the extent of the horrors. You listen to what's going on, but you don't hear the full extent of it.

Rockie Blunt, who died in 2011, inadvertently gave us a sentence that describes Western views of the war, more prevalent now than in his own time—we listen to stories of war and of the Holocaust, but we do not hear the message, as violence continues and discrimination is still present in our society.