Faces of the Holocaust: Fred Long, Liberator

Born on a farm in Harlan County, Kentucky, Fred enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. He was trained as a medical corpsman in England and participated in the Normandy invasion in June 1944. He was with Patton’s 3rd Army as it moved across France and Belgium into Germany in 1944-45. Allied troops were not told of the existence of the concentration camps (although their superiors knew), and it was often a traumatic experience when young soldiers stumbled into them. As Fred said, even the horrors of the battlefield were not enough to prepare someone for his first sight of a death camp. His regiment was the first to enter Dachau and the episode affected him for the rest of his life (he died in 1999). During his short stay at Dachau, assisting the survivors, he drew a remarkable map of the camp, and this map is now part of our exhibit “Prejudice and Memory” at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton.