Howard Cwick: " If we were lucky enough to survive and make it home, I would never allow that horror to be forgotten". I was a liberator who, unexpectedly, was one of the first American Gls to enter Buchenwald. I came from an Orthodox Jewish family and was raised in Coney Island. As a member of the Combat Engineer Battalion, I was trained in demolition, specializing in mines and booby traps. When in Germany, while waiting for a vehicle to take me to Company Headquarters, I mistakenly got into the wrong jeep, and the driver and I found ourselves outside the gates of Buchenwald. The source of the stench we had endured for the past five days was now apparent. The gates were not locked, and several other Gls and I were confronted by a field littered with scores and scores of bodies. Walking among them were barely alive, walking skeletons with hollow faces and sunken eyes. There were huge flatbed wagons, each piled high with eighty to one hundred bodies awaiting disposal. Several inmates dragged a Kappa (a fellow Jew who collaborated with the Germans) up to me and the group of Gls standing nearby. A mob of inmates had gathered around us demanding that the Kappa be given to them. To this day I still feel the guilt of permitting that killing. While walking among the dead and still dying, I swore an oath: That if I were lucky enough to survive and make it home, I would never allow that horror to be forgotten. I have honored that oath. Having carried a camera all through my army days, I took twenty-two photographs of the horrors I saw. Those photographs and the original film are now in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. D.C. As a many-time volunteer for Israel, I have served with both Israel’s army and her navy. I still carry two of my most precious and prized possessions, my American Gl dog tag and my Israeli TSAHAL dog tag.