By JOSEPH KELLARD
Because the route was similar to the one Saft took through Europe during World War II, Saft and his wife, Dortohy, decided to vacation on an organized cruise along the Danube and Rhine rivers which travel from Vienna to the Netherlands.
The ship passed through Wurzburg, Nuremberg and Regensburg in Germany and Gmunden in Austria. While in Nuremburg, Saft asked the tour guide to take him to the stadium.
During the war, Saft was staff sergeant of the 576th Motor Ambulance Co. which took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy. The medic company advance with front-line troops to Nuremberg, and along the way his company was involved in the Remagen Bridge battle and the Battle of the Bulge. From the Normandy invasion to the end of the war, the company took care of 26,000 patients.
Saft had a photo taken of him posing before the Nuremburg stadium, the only standing structure of an otherwise city bombed to rubble in 1945. This past August, while on his cruise, Saft, 80, wanted another photo taken of him standing in the same spot as 57 years ago, this time with his wife, who he was separated from for two years during the war.
"It was an awesome experience being back there, especially with my wife," Saft told the Herald from his home in Boca Raton, where he is a semi-retired executive for a medical supply company. "To think I would be back there after the experiences I had during the war, it was emotionally overpowering."
Today, the facades of the reconstructed buildings in the older section of the city have been restored to their pre-war style, Saft said. "We also visited the courtroom where the trial was after the war."
Saft helped liberate a slave labor camp in Austria where 500 Jewish women were starving and in tattered clothes. He described the scene as a "horrible, horrible site." He went on to Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps, where he saw the mass graves filled with bones and "smelled death."
"There are people who say this never happened," Saft said. "Well, it happened at it was as bad as anyone can imagine."
For his service, Saft received the World War II Victory, Normandy and Good Conduct medals, and five campaign ribbons.
The Safts hope to visit Normandy next year, but, Stanley said, "as things are going in the world right now, we might have to put it off."
