Leo Heller: “Nobody should have to experience what I saw again. The Holocaust was the most terrible thing that could have possibly happened. I was so young seeing it. I learned that we must never let something like this happen again, we must be forever watchful”. Leon Heller is a Jewish liberator who has told his story to the Holocaust Documentation Center of Southeast Florida. Dr. Siegel viewed his tape with him and witnessed how very emotional these memories still are for him. I was born in Chicago to a Conservative Jewish family in an assimilated neighborhood. Still, I experienced anti-Semitism as a youth. At the synagogue we attended. I was told of the atrocities going on in Europe, and we were encouraged to take care of "our own" and to do whatever we could to help the European Jews. I graduated from high school and then went to Wright Junior College. I was drafted into the army at age eighteen. My brother was already in the army in France. I wanted desperately to go to Europe but was sent first to Texas to be part of the Tank Destroyer Battalion. I was nineteen when I was sent abroad to fight on the front lines in Germany. As a private assigned to the 607th Tank Destroyer Battalion. I was part of the unit to liberate Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. When we entered camp, I vividly remember the skeletal men in stripes, joyous that the American soldiers were there bringing freedom. I spoke in Yiddish to one small man and asked about family members I knew had been taken from their homes. This man told me of how he was to carry the bodies to and from the crematorium. The captives were giving us whatever they had. I wish I had given them my clothes. I was completely unprepared for what I encountered there. The vivid memory of the bodies in the crematorium and the stench will never leave me. I was so enraged that upon entering another German town on a raid the next day, even though it was empty of Germans, I destroyed anything of theirs that I could find. One week later I went to Dachau but no victims were left. We visited the barracks and saw the horror of the spaces including the meat hooks, the showers and the crematorium. I returned to the United States to Roosevelt College and went into the family shoe business. I married in 1953.and we had three children. Two of my children have married second-generation Holocaust survivors and so I have been able to share my experience with my family. Why did this happen? Education is so important, but it is all difficult to express.