Group honors Upstate man who helped liberate concentration camps in Holocaust

GREER, S.C. (FOX Carolina) - Friday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and a group in Greer is working to honor an Upstate man who helped end one of the darkest periods in world history.

Horace Berry grew up in Greer and went to Clemson for college before heading to Europe to fight in WWII.

“He was very genuine, he was the same with everybody,” Berry’s son Ladson Berry said. “He wasn’t one way with one person, different with another. And really taught my brother and me to respect others, and he really did.”

Ladson Berry said his father never talked about his experiences as a captain during WWII. He said he didn’t know what Berry saw until he did an interview with the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust in the early 1990s.

“He would tell us that there was just no way to describe the cruelty that he witnessed and that he didn’t know that that type of evil existed,” Ladson Berry said.

Around a year after sharing his story, Berry passed away.

The City of Greer is now working to honor Berry by participating in the Butterfly Project, which remembers the 1.5 million children who died in the Holocaust. Eventually, the art installation from the project will be put in an Upstate park in Berry’s honor.