This week (Nov. 11) in 1921, exactly three years after World War I ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the Tomb of the Unknowns was dedicated at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia during an Armistice Day ceremony presided over by President Warren Harding. Inside of that tomb was America’s first “Unknown Soldier” — now the symbol of every unknown soldier who has died in America’s wars.

So how was this particular soldier, whoever he is, chosen?  In September of 1921, the U.S. War Department ordered the Quartermaster General to select an unknown soldier from those thousands of American G.I.s buried in France. Subsequently four unidentified American soldiers were exhumed from cemeteries in Aisne-Maine, Somme, Meuse-Argonne and St. Mihiel — each the scene of a major WWI battle. The four soldiers were then put in identical caskets and transported to Chalons-sur-Marne where a ceremony honoring them was held.

After the ceremony, Quartermaster Major Robert Harbold ordered the four caskets placed in an adjoining room until the arrival of the six American pallbearers who were to carry the casket of the chosen unknown soldier to its next destination.  The six pallbearers were all non-commissioned officers who had themselves been decorated for valor.

For reasons unknown even today, Harbold chose Sgt. Edward Younger of Illinois as the pallbearer who would decide which of the four soldiers would become the “Unknown Soldier.”  Harbold gave Younger, a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, a bouquet of roses to place on whichever casket he chose, and then Harbold and the other pallbearers left the room.

As Younger tells it, he circled the caskets three times before suddenly stopping in front of the third casket from the left.  “What caused me to stop, I don’t know,” he later said. “It was as though something pulled me.”

Younger placed the roses on the casket and saluted, after which the six pallbearers carried the “Unknown Soldier” to a public viewing. The casket was then shipped to the French port of Le Havre and placed on a ship bound for America.  On November 9, that ship steamed up the Potomac River and docked at the Washington Navy Yard.  A horse-drawn caisson then carried the casket to the Capitol, where it lay in state until its historic ceremony on November 11.  In the meantime, the other three unknown soldiers were re-buried at Romagne Cemetery, east of Paris.

As for Sgt. Younger, he was honorably discharged from the army in 1922 and returned to Illinois, where he lived until suffering a fatal heart attack in 1942.  An unsung, if not unknown, soldier, he is buried next to his wife in Section 18 of Arlington National Cemetery.

Few have lived a life as meaningful or full as did Nancy Wake.  Living in France in 1940 when Nazi Germany subjugated that country, she became a leader of the “maquis” groups — the French resistance fighters — who sabotaged the Nazi occupation of France at every opportunity.  Wake was so good at her job, and so good at escaping capture, that the Gestapo nicknamed her “The White Mouse” because she avoided every trap.

Fearing the law of averages, however, in 1943 her colleagues convinced her to flee France and head for England, where she underwent rigorous training as part of England’s Special Operations Executive.   She proved to be an outstanding trainee, and after completing her training she was parachuted back into France to once again assume a leadership position in the resistance.  Her duties ranged from recruiting new maquis members to procuring weapons, to leading attacks on hundreds of German military installations.

In some ways she was an anomaly. She was breathtakingly beautiful and used her beauty to full effect — she was never without her lipstick and face cream — but she was also a hardened and often hard-hearted killer.  She handled a machine gun better than most men and once killed a German soldier with her bare hands.  And when she discovered another female resistance fighter was a spy she shot her herself, later saying she had no regrets. “I was not a very nice person,” she explained, “and it (shooting the spy) didn’t put me off my breakfast.  After all, she had an easy death … her death was a lot better than the one I would have got.”

Which was almost certainly true.  From the spring of 1944 until France was liberated, she and her fellow resistance fighters fought an estimated 20,000 German soldiers and SS troops, inflicting nearly 1,500 casualties on the enemy while suffering less than 200 casualties.  At one point Wake topped the Gestapo’s “most wanted” list, with a bounty of 5 million francs on her head.

After the war ended she returned to her place of birth, Australia, where she unsuccessfully pursued a political career, before finally returning to London.  There, for a time, she lived in the Stafford Hotel near Piccadilly (in gratitude for her war service, the hotel owners let her stay there at almost no charge), where she often started her day in the hotel bar drinking gin and tonics.

A colleague once said of her, “She is the most feminine woman I know until the fighting starts.  Then she is like five men.”

Wake died this week (Aug. 7) in 2011, three weeks shy of her 99^th birthday.  She was cremated and, at her request, her ashes were scattered in France.

Even today, if you scoop up a handful of dirt from the ground at Auschwitz, the Nazis’ most famous World War II concentration camp, you can find fragments of human bone, the remains of some 2 million Jews, gypsies and other “subhumans” who died at Auschwitz and its sister camp Birkenau (Auschwitz II) between 1940 and 1945.  That number, 2 million, is one third of the total number of dead commonly referred to when discussing the Holocaust.

From all over Nazi-occupied Europe, Jews were shipped by train to Auschwitz, located near Krakow, Poland, where they were separated into three groups: those who would die immediately (the old, the infirm), those who would die eventually (the young, the fit for work), and those who would die gruesomely (twins, dwarfs and the deformed — the subjects of experiments by doctors such as the “Angel of Death,” Nazi physician Josef Mengele).

Death also came in several forms, the most humane being to line up the victims and shoot them. Others were sent to the gas chambers where they were literally strangled by the suffocating effects of a cyanide gas called Zyklon-B. The rest were starved, beaten, tortured or worked to death, or were killed by any number of camp diseases — typhus and dysentery the most common — which spread easily among the unsanitary living conditions.  Inmates slept three to a bunk, shared one toilet (a hole in a wooden bench), and except when working were locked in their barracks even in the most oppressive heat.

As a result, as many as 20,000 people a day perished, making disposal of the bodies a daunting challenge — one that was met at first by mass graves and later by crematoriums that operated around the clock. A joke among the camp’s guards was that the only way a prisoner could escape Auschwitz was “up the chimney.”

Auschwitz officially opened this week (June 14) in 1940, and although it was just one of many camps working to fulfill Adolf Hitler’s order that Europe’s Jews be destroyed, Auschwitz today has become the symbol of the Nazis’ — and by extension all of mankind’s — capacity for evil.

Ensuring that no one ever forgets about that capacity is one reason the Polish government, in cooperation with several Jewish organizations, made Auschwitz a museum in 1946, and since then approximately 35 million people have visited it.  For many, their visit was a life-altering experience.

To enter this “museum,” which is surrounded by the same barbed wire fence the prisoners faced, you pass through a small gate with a cruelly mocking sign above it that reads, “Arbeit macht frei”—“Work makes you free.”

At Auschwitz, it wasn’t work that made you free. It was death.