AMERICAN LIBERATOR

Bill Ruth, a native of Johnstown, Pa., and a radio operator with the U.S. Army 3rd Armored Division, had no idea of the hell he was about to enter as his unit approached the Nordhausen concentration camp in central Germany on April 15, 1945.

“After a bitter battle with these fanatic Germans,” Ruth wrote in his diary at the time, “Nordhausen has fallen and what we encountered is sickening, atrocious and mind boggling.

“What we saw is hard to describe. ... Bodies heaped on piles with barely enough flesh to hold the skeleton together. What looked like hundreds of dead bodies on a pile, you would see a hand move, or leg or a muted groan. These poor souls were literally starved to death and left to die on this pile.”

Ruth, now 92, said he went to war when “President Roosevelt sent me a real nice invitation.” It was 1942 and he was 20 years old.

Ruth said he survived “five near misses” before arriving at Nordhausen.

While he has vivid memories of other wartime experiences, Ruth said he doesn’t want to remember but cannot forget the horror of liberating a death camp.

“So much happens during the war and you don’t think about it until years later,” he said at his Worthington home. “I felt like a lot of guys did. It was our duty.”

Nordhausen was an extermination camp where prisoners were left to die of illness and starvation.

Ruth, a Roman Catholic, remembers praying the Rosary after witnessing the horror there. “I wondered if the Germans were praying for the same thing as I was — that the war ends soon.”

One of her few clear memories is the war in the skies: U.S. warplanes flying overhead to bomb Germany, and German V2 bombs she thought looked like stovepipes heading across the channel to Great Britain.

Her brother, sent elsewhere, also survived the war.

Blumenstein moved to New Jersey after the war and married and had two children. She recently moved to Columbus after her husband died, to be near her daughter.

“How I made it this far, I have no clue,” she said. “I don’t remember love. I remember hunger, cold and incredible fear.”

Like many other Holocaust survivors, Blumenstein asks herself, “Why me? I don’t believe in God anymore, so I can’t say God saved me.”