Anthony C. Acevedo

Anthony Acevedo became the first Mexican-American to be registered with the US Holocaust museum’s survivor database in 2010.

A medic assigned to the 70th Infantry Division during the war, Acevedo was one of the 350 U.S. soldiers captured during the Battle of the Bulge in France and sent to the Berga An Der Elster labor camp — a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany from which only about 180 would survive by war’s end, he says.

It was during his time at Berga that Acevedo would begin writing in a diary, documenting everything he saw; logging information on the dead, sketching and pretty much doing whatever he could to keep his mind moving. This diary was his lifeline, he says.

Acevedo kept the diary hidden in his pants. He feared death if the commanders saw it. Yet he believed it was his duty as an Army medic to catalog the deaths and the atrocities against the 350 U.S. soldiers at the camp known as Berga, a subcamp of the notorious Buchenwald compound.

On June 12, 1945, when he was 21, Acevedo returned to the U.S. and was discharged that year, on December 10. He earned two Purple Hearts for injuries. He also received the Good Conduct Medal, two Bronze Stars and a Medic Badge.

• U.S. Holocaust Museum - "In his own words"
• Mexican-American honored as WWII Vet and Holocaust survivor
• CNN.com, 'You don't forget': Medic's Holocaust diary tells story of hell