Dozens of Vietnamese Americans gathered at a senior center in Norcross on Wednesday to mark the 50th anniversary of what Von Tran called a dark day in history.
“It’s a day of suffering, of separations of family, of death, of thousands and hundreds of thousands killed and forced into reeducation camps and imprisoned, Holocaust-style, if you can imagine that,” said Tran, CEO of First Senior Center of Georgia, which hosted the event. “Some were imprisoned for five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, trying to brainwash them into communist ideology.”
In Vietnam, April 30, 1975, is celebrated as Reunification Day, when North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, uniting the nation under socialist rule. But to members of the Vietnamese diaspora who fled South Vietnam after its fall, April 30 is marked as the Fall of Saigon, a day to lament the end of South Vietnam and to remember the people who died fighting for the nation…