Concentration Camp Liberators from Pittsburgh
- Richard Murphy
- Dec 10, 2025
- 2 min read
I recently gave a public talk (October 2025) at the Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall about two GIs from Pittsburgh that liberated concentration camps.
The families of the two GIs I focused on to tell the story around had only vague knowledge of what their fathers did before I recreated their wartime histories. In the talk, I discussed who those soldiers were before the war, then their induction into the Army and their deployment to France, their experiences in the Infantry, their experiences upon liberating the camps, and then how all that affected them and likely shaped the rest of their lives and those of their kids and grandkids.
I believe that guys like these went through two hells: combat, close and personal, and then the camps as Liberators. Nobody can know now what that was like, and I don’t claim to, but I shared significant knowledge of combat related PTSD and how that can travel through families and down generations. I also shared a lot of information from The Liberators, a fantastic book on the matter by Michael Hirsch. The Liberators paid a high price as they witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust first-hand.
The good news is how these guys lived when they came home. Things were hard, no doubt, but the resilience to thrive and be good dads and friends and members of their community is beyond commendable, especially considering the ever-present internal demons they struggled with until they died. In essence here, part of what made this generation great was not what they went through before the war and during it, but how they handled the war after it.
After spending countless hours researching these guys, and especially after talking at length to their families, I feel like I know them, but, more importantly, now, their families know them better.
More work to come on Liberators, a lot more.
