Family of Holocaust liberator from Ellwood City keeps history alive, 80 years later

CBS News

08-05-2025

Thursday marked 80 years since the end of World War II in Europe and the end of the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews.
Shortly after the war started, one young man was just beginning his life in the small borough of Ellwood City, Lawrence County, when he was drafted. Eventually, he would liberate a concentration camp, and what he saw was unimaginable and would stay with him the rest of his life.
Throughout her childhood, Patty Partington didn't know much about her dad's time overseas.
"My father, like most servicemen, when they came home, they didn't talk about the war much," Partington said. "They sort of felt like their story wasn't any different than anybody else. He said, 'We came home, and we just wanted to get on with our lives.'"
It took Guy Prestia 50 years, but he eventually opened up, not just to family, but also to the public, sharing his memories, until he died last August at 102.
"The stench there was just so bad that you could never forget about that," Prestia said in 2022 during a talk with students at Riverside High School, hosted by the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.
Prestia graduated from Lincoln High School in 1940 and was working in a machine shop when he was drafted. He spent 511 days in combat with the 45th Infantry Division before receiving an assignment he and his fellow brothers weren't prepared for.
"He said, 'That's when I realized what we were fighting for,'" Partington said.
Dachau was the first and longest-operating concentration camp created by the Nazis, located near Munich. When Prestia and his unit arrived there on April 29, 1945, they came across dozens of rail cars carrying what they thought were stacks of logs.
"When we got closer, we saw that they were dead bodies," Prestia said. "They were men, women, children on there, on that train."
The camp's commanding officers had already abandoned the site, knowing the Allies were on the way.
To try to hide their crimes, the Nazis sent thousands of prisoners on death marches, and left behind thousands more, either dead or barely holding on, with guards who didn't put up much resistance.
In the kitchen, Prestia said they found big pots of soup, which they later learned had been poisoned.
"They had planned on killing everyone in that camp. They didn't want any survivors," Partington said.
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, there were more than 200,000 prisoners in Dachau between 1933 and 1945. The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial reports more than 41,000 died there, although the exact number is unclear. Prestia's division, with other American forces, liberated about 32,000.
"They were so undernourished that the medics told us that if you gave them any food, that would probably kill them," Prestia said.
Eight days later, on May 8, the war in Europe ended, and while Prestia was at Dachau for only one day, it never left him.
"He said, 'I believe it taught me empathy for other people in other situations outside of myself,'" Partington said.
It's a lesson his daughter said is just as imperative in our world today as it was 80 years ago, when her father helped end the atrocities of the Holocaust.