I asked my mom a few weeks ago for info and she said similar things to what I heard from him and from others about how he just hoped to forget that time of his life and that he saw things that troubled him his whole life. Today I was thinking about him and read his obituary which I hadn't read for many years (he passed away in 2004) and read that he was in the 42nd Infantry division in WWII. So then it occurred to me that I could learn about his experience by doing a google search on the 42nd. Well, I discovered that there is a Wikipedia page about the 42nd and now I clearly understand why he never talked about WWII. They were in the Battle of the Bulge (which my grandfather had briefly spoken about), but then the division was among the first to have liberated the Dachau concentration camp. The description of the liberation is heart-breaking considering the condition of the prisoners and that American soldiers killed several of the guards after they had surrendered and some of the subsequent chaos in trying to help the survivors.