DALLAS — On Tuesday in North Texas, a 97-year-old World War II veteran took off in a WWII Warbird.
While Bill Kongable admires the memorabilia, he never flew in the war. He was on the ground, assigned to the 89th infantry division.
In 1945, he and his fellow soldiers liberated Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp liberated by the U.S. army.
“I was 19 years old at the time,” Kongable told WFAA at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum.
"And coming from a small Oklahoma town, it just didn’t occur to me I would see something like this," he said.
But, Kongable did see it.
And 78 years later, he still sees it.
“Three thousand naked, emaciated bodies,” he remembered. “Just thrown in on top of each other in a tangle of bone and flesh…It’s something you don’t forget. In addition to the sight. There’s the smell. It’s always there.”
Kongable lives in Houston but came to Dallas ahead of VE Day, Victory in Europe Day. That’s the day German troops surrendered.
“May the 8th I believe it was,” Kongable said.
He’ll talk to Dallas school children on Thursday at the museum. And to any adult who will listen, he said, for as long as he has left.
“As long as my voice holds up and my hearing holds up, I don’t have to see you but I can hear you!” he said.
There’s a reason he’s determined.
"I'd like to influence whoever listens to me to do everything they can to prevent that sort of thing from happening so there won’t be a holocaust in the U.S. It could happen," he said.
“Watch out for the politicians,” he told WFAA quietly. “Be sure that they know they have the best interest of the country in mind… that’s the biggest danger.”
It’s a lesson Kongable learned from the history he lived, and it’s the history he will never forget.