Jim Hoyt

2005

My father worked for the Rock Island Railroad and my mother was a rural schoolteacher. I went from kindergarten through twelfth grade in the same building. My biggest achievement was winning the Johnson County Spelling Bee in 1939. I was in the eighth grade and I still remember the word I spelled correctly: archive.

After basic training I was sent overseas and went through the Battle of the Bulge. I'm the last living of the first four American soldiers who liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.

There were thousands of bodies piled high. I saw hearts that had been taken from live people in medical experiments. They said a wife of one of the SS officers – they called her the Bitch of Buchenwald – saw a tattoo she liked on the arm of a prisoner, and then had the skin made into a lampshade. I saw that, too.

Seeing these things, it changes you. I was a kid. Des Moines had been the furthest I'd ever been from home. I have posttraumatic-stress syndrome. I still have horrific dreams. Usually someone needs help and I can't help them. I'm in a situation where I'm trapped and I can't get out. My oldest son, who was awarded the Purple Heart for service in Vietnam, suffers from the same thing.

I go to a group therapy session every week at the VA hospital and we talk about what each of us is going through. For the fifty-year anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, they asked me to return. Th ey would've paid for the whole thing. But I said no. I didn't want to bring back those memories.

If I had to do it over again, I would have pushed to be a psychologist – if for no other reason than to understand myself better.

I met my wife Doris at a dance in Solon back in 1948. We have six children, and they all live close by. My wife's the love of my life. I don't know what I'd do without her.