Anthony Acevedo, Who Documented His Holocaust Ordeal, Dies at 93

Anthony Acevedo, a 20-year-old Army medic, had been captured during the Battle of the Bulge when a Red Cross care package arrived in March 1945 at the Nazi slave labor camp where he was imprisoned.

It contained a diary and a fountain pen. Between the diary’s grayish-green covers, Acevedo would record a grim roster of prisoner deaths (by dysentery, heart attack, jaundice, influenza and starvation); the cruelty of the guards; and rumors of U.S. troops closing in on the Berga camp, a part of the Buchenwald complex. It was a rare accounting of Nazi atrocities by an American prisoner of war.

The rumors were true. Acevedo and about 280 of his fellow prisoners were soon evacuated and taken on a forced march south — “the death march from Bataan couldn’t be worse than this,” he wrote — with artillery fire exploding around them and fighters of the Army Air Forces dropping bombs. The war in Europe was near its end. But the prisoner-of-war appeared no closer to freedom.

Acevedo was liberated later that month but suffered for decades from night terrors and post-traumatic stress syndrome. On Feb. 11, he died at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Loma Linda, California, having bequeathed his written testimony to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2010. He was 93.

Acevedo appears to be the first Mexican-American registered in the museum’s database of survivors and victims.

His son Fernando, who confirmed the death, said that Acevedo had had congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. But the torture he endured at Berga, he added, had left a lasting impact on his father’s health.

In December, Fernando Acevedo said, he found in his father’s military records a psychiatric evaluation that further confirmed his suffering. After an initial interrogation at Berga, he was raped while other captors laughed at him.

“I said, ‘Papi, I found this,'” Fernando recalled telling his father. “He looked at it and his eyes got big. He said: ‘I’m glad you did. I want you to tell everybody about it.'”

Anthony Claude Acevedo was born in San Bernardino, California, on July 31, 1924. His father, Francisco Guillermo Acevedo, was an engineer. His mother, the former Maria Louisa Contreras Limantur, a homemaker, died when Anthony was 2 years old.

Young Anthony attended a segregated school in Pasadena with other Mexican-American children until he was 13; he and his five siblings then left for the state of Durango, Mexico, when his father and stepmother, the former Maria Louisa Morgan, were deported because they had lacked the proper immigration papers.

Anthony’s father found success in Durango, where he became the director of public works. But he was physically and emotionally abusive to Anthony, Fernando Acevedo said in a telephone interview. And after a U.S. government representative contacted him to serve in the war, Anthony, who “wanted to get away from his father,” crossed the border and was inducted into the Army.

Interested in being a doctor, he trained as a medic at Camp Adair, near Corvallis, Oregon, before shipping to Europe with the 70th Infantry Division to fight the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. Among the “repair jobs” he performed in combat were “sewing thumbs, cutting a leg off, putting on tourniquets and sewing up the stump of a leg,” he told the Holocaust museum in a 2010 oral history interview.

On Jan. 6, 1945, he and other men from his unit were captured by German troops. “They forced us to take our shoes off — boots off — and walk down the slope, barefoot in the snow, and march for a mile to the trucks,” he told the museum.

He was taken to Stalag IX-B, an overcrowded and notoriously unhygienic POW camp near the spa town of Bad Orb, Germany. Not long after his arrival, Acevedo was among 350 Jews and so-called undesirables selected for shipment to Berga.

“They put us on a train, and we traveled six days and six nights,” he told CNN in 2008. “It was a boxcar that would fit heads of cattle. They had us 80 to a boxcar.”

They arrived at Berga on Feb. 8. The POWs were fed tiny rations of bread made of sawdust, ground glass and barley, and soup made from cats and rats. Prisoners who tried to escape were shot in their foreheads with wooden bullets. He and the other medics in the barracks were told to fill the bullet holes with wax.

Acevedo began writing in the diary on March 20 (“Yesterday our planes dropped leaflets as well as bombs”), and he alternated accounts of horrors with quotidian observations (“The weather is beautiful and it looks like spring, which has finally come to Germany”), good news (“This morning us medics got together and ate Scrambled Eggs & Sausage from our Red Cross Boxes”) and biting humor (“Lenten Fast ends at Noon today — But does not apply to us we have been fasting since December 31, 1944”).

He extended the ink in his pen by adding snow and urine. He hid the diary in his pants or under hay in the barracks.

And, as dozens of prisoners died on the terrifying three-week-long march, Acevedo continued to write.

In one entry, he wrote about Burdeski, a 41-year-old prisoner who had diphtheria. Acevedo wanted to use his pen as a tracheotomy tube to save him.

“The Germans did not let us so we got upset,” he wrote on April 13. “We said they were going to kill him and the German guard swung his rifle at me and my buddy hitting us with the butt in the face” and “cracked one of my jaw’s tooth and swung back at my buddy his glasses dropped. The German guard crushed them with his foot — Burdeski did not survive to the hospital.”

On April 23, Acevedo and other prisoners were freed; he weighed just 87 pounds. They had been in a barn, and most of the guards had fled. But one “came up to us and gave himself up and saying that we were free,” he wrote. “Boy everything looked to exciting that morning.”

And, he added, “our last death was announced.” The diary was not a secret to his family, and neither were his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder. The book, with its yellowing pages, became a sort of plaything at home, with crayon scribblings by his children on the last page. But it was a major acquisition for the Holocaust museum, which has more than 200 diaries in its collection from various locations, written in 18 languages.

“It was the first written by an American citizen held in a concentration camp,” Kyra Schuster, a museum curator, said in a telephone interview. Publicity from Acevedo’s donation led three other Berga POWs, or their families, to give their wartime diaries to the museum.

“The four men had four different experiences that cover different things,” Schuster said. One was written on scraps of paper, another behind family photographs, and the other was a second diary that had arrived in the same Red Cross package as Acevedo’s.

Acevedo aspired to become a doctor after his discharge — and he sutured his children’s wounds at home with supplies from an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag — but he never did. He worked for North American Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas and Hughes Aircraft as a design engineer.

In addition to Fernando, Acevedo is survived by two other sons, Ernesto and Anthony; a daughter, Rebeca Acevedo-Carlin; six grandchildren; a sister, Estella; and two brothers, Billy and Augustin. His first marriage, to Amparo Martinez, ended in divorce. His second wife, the former Maria Dolores Lamb, died in 2014. Acevedo risked his life by keeping his diary. But, he said, he had an obligation to maintain it.

“He said he had faith that he’d make it,” Fernando Acevedo said, “and that hopefully one day people would see what the men went through.”