Published Aug 25, 2026, 10:31 AM EDT
Tim Kiniry was an Army medic in World War II. His service inspired other generations.
Heading into his final months as a World War II combat medic, Sgt. Andrew “Tim” Kiniry thought he had seen enough carnage to haunt him for the rest of his long life. Kiniry landed on Omaha Beach along the French coastline on June 16, 1944, just 10 days after the D-Day invasion. In the brutal winter of 1944-45, the Army soldier was in the thick of the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s last stand to salvage his crumbling Third Reich. Despite the devastation he had already witnessed, it paled in comparison to the hell he would walk into as the 45th Evacuation Hospital Combat Unit entered the Buchenwald Concentration Camp on April 28, 1945. “We were put in the back of trucks and not told anything, which was the Army’s deal—you never knew where you were going,” Kiniry said on April 16 at Stockton University. “I didn’t know the first thing (about Buchenwald). We pulled inside the gates and we came across an odor of which I can never describe. It was terrible.” Kiniry, 104, captivated an audience of more than 100 students and local residents during a presentation at Stockton University in New Jersey. The discussion was moderated by Doug Cervi, a Stockton adjunct professor, and sponsored by the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center (HRC), the Jewish Federation of Atlantic and Cape May Counties and the Board of Jewish Education of Atlantic and Cape May Counties.
