On April 14, 1945, American soldier Joe Poulin wrote a letter to Norma Begin, his girlfriend in Waterville, describing what he saw when he entered a concentration camp with the 89th Infantry Division in Germany.

Poulin’s letter was loaned by his daughter Elaine Lovejoy to the Maine Holocaust and Human Rights Center, which will exhibit the handwritten account in the new Michael Klahr Center at the University of Maine at Augusta. Excerpts of Poulin’s letter:

“I’ll try to describe it to you, but it won’t be anything like I saw, because you just can’t put it in words.”

The concentration camp was surrounded by barbed wire and the barracks were “dirty and filthy.”

“We entered the camp and the first thing we saw in a clearing between some buildings were a pile of bodies.”

Poulin wrote that the victims, who included Russians and Poles, were too weak from starvation to travel when the Germans retreated, so they were shot.

“I never thought people could hate each other so much to do things like that!”