Seventy-one years later, Isadore Cutler can't shake the sensory overload that he experienced on that day in April 1945.
That was when he and other members of the Army's 17th Signal Operations Battalion arrived at the notorious Buchenwald Concentration Camp. They had smelled it kilometers before they could see it.
"I want to tell you of my worst nightmare to this day," said the 91-year-old Cutler, "piles of human bones of men, women and children; the crematorium; the smell; the human skeletons walking around."
Cutler shared the memories of his World War II experience with the Natick Soldier Systems Center community April 16 during NSSC's Holocaust Remembrance in Hunter Auditorium. It had all begun for the then 20-year-old on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He and the 17th had come ashore at Normandy Beach.
"We were sitting ducks," Cutler recalled. "Most of my outfit died on that morning 70 years ago.
"I will never forget my buddies who lost their lives at such a young age, nor what I saw at Buchenwald."
His superiors had given Cutler and his fellow Soldiers no idea what they would encounter at Buchenwald.
"I did know that just before we left, our truck was loaded up with food," Cutler said. "When we got to the camp, it was disbursed. And they had to be very careful about how they handed the food out to these people, because these people hadn't eaten for so long. Some of the people who sort of gulped the food down got good and sick."
Cutler, who is Jewish, and the other Soldiers became ill at the sight of human beings in that condition.
"They were emaciated," Cutler said. "They lived in terrible, unsanitary conditions.
"The American troops were all shocked at what they saw. We all had a job to do, and we just had to do it."
Years later, Cutler had a medical examination to discover the cause of pain in his chest. His doctor found part of his esophagus was eroded, and he suggested that the fumes he had breathed in at the camp could have done it. But that was far from the worst mark left on Cutler by Buchenwald.
"I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, and I can see myself laying on top of the dead bodies," Cutler said. "I don't understand why that is, but it's something that happens."
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