One vet's story

The memories are still fresh, some 60 years later. [Anthony] Acevedo keeps reading his entries, scrawled on the pages with a Schaeffer fountain pen he held dear.

He was one of 350 U.S. soldiers held at Berga an der Elster, a satellite camp of the Nazis' notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. The soldiers, working 12-hour days, were used by the German army to dig tunnels and hide equipment in the final weeks of the war. Less than half of the soldiers survived their captivity and a subsequent death march, he says.