The U.S. medic who documented the horrors of Nazi camps

In March 1945, Anthony Acevedo found a diary and fountain pen in a Red Cross care package at the Nazi slave labor camp where he was imprisoned. For the next month—until the day he was liberated by Allied forces—the 20-year-old U.S. Army medic meticulously documented his Holocaust ordeal. Keeping the pen’s ink topped up with snow and urine, Acevedo recorded a grim roster of inmate deaths, from dysentery, heart attack, jaundice, influenza, gunshot, and starvation. It was a rare firsthand account of Nazi atrocities by an American prisoner of war. “Prisoners were being murdered and tortured,” said Acevedo, the first Mexican-American to be designated a Holocaust survivor. “I tried keeping track of who they were and how they died. I’m glad I did it.” Born in San Bernardino, Calif., Acevedo “attended a segregated school in Pasadena with other Mexican-American children until he was 13,” said The New York Times. He spent his teenage years in Mexico, but returned to the U.S. at age 19 to enlist—and to escape his “physically and emotionally abusive” father. Acevedo was captured by German troops in January 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge. Taken to a prisoner-of-war camp, he was “among 350 Jews and so-called undesirables selected for shipment” to Berga an der Elster, part of the Buchenwald complex. Subsisting on “bread made from sawdust, ground glass, and barley,” and soup thickened with the flesh of rats and stray cats, inmates at Berga slept “two to a bunk, naked and without blankets,” said The Washington Post. Acevedo was “exempt from hard labor” so he could tend to his fellow inmates. But he still endured extreme brutality—on one occasion, “his German captors subjected him to a savage gang rape.” As the Allies closed in, Acevedo and his fellow prisoners were evacuated and forced to march 217 miles in 17 days, said CNN.com. U.S. soldiers found the POWs on April 23, 1945, in a barn where they’d been left by their German guards; Acevedo, who weighed 149 pounds when he was captured, was down to 87 pounds. He “settled into a successful aerospace engineering career” back in the U.S., but didn’t speak about his wartime experiences until 2008. Two years later, he donated his diary to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “People have to know what happened,” he said. “This is how low man can get.”