Exhibit has 2 perspectives of death camp

Videotaped accounts of a prisoner and and a liberator are included.
CINCINNATI (AP) -- Henry Meyer was a Jewish teen imprisoned by Adolf Hitler's regime. Elmer Reis was a U.S. Army soldier who helped liberate the Nazis' Ohrdruf camp in Germany where Meyer had been a prisoner.
Meyer and Reis didn't meet until last year, as their accounts of the horrors of Nazi Germany's death camps were being prepared for a Holocaust exhibit at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, a training center for rabbis.
The videotaped accounts of both men -- and others who liberated or were liberated from the camps -- were added this past week to the college's "Mapping Our Tears" exhibit, where visitors view the videotapes in an attic setting similar to those that Jewish fugitives might have used as shelter from persecution by the Nazis.
The horror
Reis, 87, an Army military policeman with an armored division when he and other soldiers entered the Ohrdruf camp, said in an interview Friday that he can close his eyes and still picture the horrors he saw: bodies of Jewish prisoners stacked "like cordwood," with other freshly slain prisoners arrayed on the ground blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs and bullet holes in the backs of their heads.
Prisoners had been forced to burn piles of the bodies, which had then been pushed into a pit with a bulldozer, Reis said.
"It was revolting," said Reis, a Cincinnati police officer before and after his military service who later went to law school. "What I saw, it just shook my boots. It was awful."
Reis said his military service against an opponent that threatened other nations taught him a lifelong lesson.
"There's a price for freedom," he said. "You have to fight every now and then to obtain it -- or maintain it."
Child prodigy
Meyer, 81, was born in Dresden, Germany, to a family of musicians and had been a child prodigy on the violin before the Holocaust. His parents and his teen brother, Joachim, died during the Nazi persecution.
Meyer said he was saved from likely execution only when he told a doctor in the Nazi camp that he had been a violinist, and the doctor remembered seeing him perform. The doctor saved Meyer's life by switching his identity with that of a man who had died.
"He changed the registration cards and I was alive again," said Meyer, whose left forearm still bears the Nazi prisoner number that his captors tattooed on him.
Meyer pleased his captors by playing cymbals in the camp's marching band. He was later able to escape from Ohrdruf and lived briefly with a German family.
Music scholarship
But upon learning that Americans had liberated the approximately 75 surviving prisoners at the camp, Meyer returned. He left for Paris and eventually the United States, where he obtained a music scholarship at New York's Juilliard School that boosted his career as a classical violinist.
He eventually wound up at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music, where he performed and taught for 35 years before retiring in 1988.
He was a founding member of the LaSalle Quartet, the music school's first quartet-in-residence, which made recordings for the Deutsche Grammophon label and played premieres by various composers. This year, the American Classical Music Hall of Fame gave Meyer a lifetime achievement award.
Meeting
Last year, Meyer learned who Reis was and introduced himself, thanking Reis for liberating him and the other prisoners 60 years earlier. Reis said he was stunned -- but delighted.
Both men have often spoken to groups about the Holocaust, saying that young generations must be aware that it happened, if only to do everything possible to keep it from occurring again.
Meyer, in a wheelchair since he was injured last year in a hit-and-run accident, said he didn't talk about the Holocaust for years, but was prodded to do so by a friend after they saw news reports about people who denied that it had occurred. Meyer recalled being scolded by his friend.
"He said, 'It's your fault. If you don't tell the people, they won't know,'" Meyer said Friday.
Reis scoffs at those who deny that the Nazis' mass murder of Jews occurred.
"They don't want to believe it," Reis said. "I was there. You can't erase from my memory what I saw."