Images of bodies stacked up like so much firewood and half-starved survivors dying on their feet haunted Robert Kellman for almost 60 years.

The horrors he saw as an Army lieutenant in charge of liberating the Nazi concentration camp near Nordhausen, Germany, in 1945 kept him silent for decades, until his daughter got him to talk about it in 1993. And even then, he spoke in a hushed, soft voice, as if the ghosts of Nordhausen were still with him.

"He said as he walked through the gate there was a huge pile of bodies," Carla Harcum recalled. "He said as he walked by the bodies, a hand reached out of the stack ... beckoning to him for help.

"He said it was the worst 24 hours of his life."

Harcum, a Yakima school district teacher, had interviewed her father as a way to provide some of the alternative high school seniors she taught with some background about World War II.

Her father's stories would provide context before the students went off to see the movie "Schindler's List," which had hit theaters that year. But, as it turns out, the interview was a learning experience for her as well, as her father revealed some details she had never heard before.

Like the fact that he had led troops into the camp by shooting the lock off the gate himself.

"Dad said, 'I unlocked it with my gun. I was the officer in charge and I was the first one through the gate,' " Harcum said. "We knew at that point he'd been there but I had no clue what had happened."

Harcum said her father, then a 27-year-old lieutenant in the Army's 3rd Armored Division, told her that he and his troops spent about 24 hours at Nordhausen, calling in a field hospital and making sure survivors got medical attention, cots and clean sheets. But even those who were ambulatory did not look like they were not going to last for much longer, he said, and recalled that many survivors were "in a daze" and "just sort of walking around."

A description by other 3rd Division members in the book "Spearhead in the West," which was published in 1946, recalled soldiers' images of those still alive at Nordhausen in more detail:

"Everywhere among the dead were the living -- emaciated, ragged shapes whose fever-bright eyes waited passively for the release of death ... Here and there a single shape tottered about, walking slowly, like a man dreaming.

"There was no hope for many of the prisoners in this place."

At some point Kellman went into the town of Nordhausen itself and recruited German townsfolk to bury the dead. And with the volunteers came heartfelt apologies.

" 'We didn't know,' they told him about the horrors at the camp," she said. "'We didn't know.'"

It was not until Kellman's funeral that all of his World War II exploits were finally told, in the eulogy, about how he participated in the Battle of the Bulge, how his unit led the First Army's advance toward Berlin after crossing under fire at Remagen. From the tale of Nordhausen to getting blown off a tank and rupturing his eardrums, but not reporting the injury because he did not want his wife to worry, to earning the Silver Star after calling in an air strike on his own position in Freist.

For all his war stories, Kellman was known more as an educator than warrior for most of his life. He died in 1995 at age 76 after a long career in education in the Yakima and Selah school districts, at Yakima Valley Community College and at Central Washington University, where he was an adjunct professor.

In the end, Harcum believes it was her father's love of education that helped him shoot the lock off the gates of Nordhausen once again to let the ghosts out for good.

"He said, 'I don't want to have to relive it,' that's what he said when he first told me no," Harcum recalled. "He didn't want to go there again."

"Then he called me later and said, 'I'll talk about it.'

"He said kids need to know."