Robert Hilliard, with the typical curiosity of a journalist, was fascinated with the idea of Holocaust survivors offering a concert at St. Ottilien. It would make a great story for his Army base newspaper, he reasoned. These rescued people were performing what they termed a “Liberation Concert” with the instruments the Nazis had issued them for sham performances, to disguise their killing grounds as “work camps.” Part of the monastery and its village near his base had become a hospital and displaced persons camp for Holocaust survivors. The camp was now under the administration of U.S. and Allied occupied forces, at the close of World War II. But the audience, not the music, would haunt him. Some of them were too weak to sit up, thin and frail and still starving under what should have been life-giving care by Allied forces at the end of World War II. “They looked like they were dying in front of my eyes,” he said, reflecting on that day. “And in fact, they were.” It led an 18-year-old serviceman to risk court-martial for publicly calling out the U.S. on its deadly neglect of Jewish survivors — both Jewish and Roma people — under its care. For his courage, Hilliard is on the list of honored rescuers displayed in the Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Naples. His work and that of others in Southwest Florida are why there are also prayers of gratitude during the 4 p.m. Sunday, April 27, Yom Hashoah Holocaust Remembrance Service at Temple Shalom. The inverse enlistment Hilliard, who will be 100 on June 25, chuckles when he’s asked if he had enlisted to serve in World War II. He was called up for the draft at the end of his freshman year of college in May of 1944. But he was sure he would be rejected because of his poor eyesight; reading the alphabet mix of an ophthalmologist’s chart was one of the requirements. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to read beyond the letters on the first line. But the way they did it was that we lined up for the examination, and one took it while the other stood outside … So when the man in front of me went in, I memorized the first two lines,” he recalled, with an impish smile. “So I guess you could say I enlisted in my own way.” His first visit to Florida was to Fort Blanding, near Starke, for basic training in 1944. He was referred to a communications team, taught Morse code and sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for further training — “Otherwise I would have been sent to D-Day,” he recalled. It turned out to be similarly perilous for Hilliard. As one of the troops in the Battle of the Bulge, his feet froze during the 41-day ordeal. “That’s another story entirely,” he added. After his dire experience there, the U.S. Army had transferred Hilliard to the Army Air Corps in what was to be a non-combat position, starting up a newspaper for its base in occupied Germany. The concert at St. Ottilien was to be one of his first feature stories. But it galvanized Hilliard, who saw the rescued still in their threadbare prison uniforms...