Those who experienced the holocaust will never forgot what they saw.

And for soldier Leo Hymas and concentration camp survivor Noemi Ban, it is important to tell their stories so that future generations will not forget either.

Holocaust Remembrance Day was April 28.

Born and raised in Idaho and Utah, Langley resident Leo Hymas wasn’t prepared for what he would see during his six months of combat at the end of World War II.

But at age 19, he liberated Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps in Germany.

In June 1944, he was drafted into the United States Army and found himself sailing to Europe.

In 1945, Hymas landed in France, where he boarded a troop train headed for the front. He said he looked out the train door near Cologne, Germany and saw a young girl, scared and starving.

“I noticed a small young girl shivering on the platform, her face sunken and her feet wrapped in rags, the little girl was starving,” Hymas said. “I handed her a chocolate bar, and suddenly, I understood that the most vulnerable, the most innocent, pay the highest price in wartime.”

They fought their way east across Germany until, on April 9, 1945, they reached the town of Weimar.  Not far from the city, in thick woods, a fence stood half-hidden in the trees, he said.

Suspecting a prisoner-of-war camp, Hymas’ commanding officer ordered him to investigate. He advanced until he reached a towering, electrified fence.

After using explosives to enter the camp, Hymas and his group confronted SS guards and saw some of the 18,000 emaciated prisoners, including children, in unspeakably filthy conditions, crematoria, cramped barracks and piles of bodies.

“What I saw that morning, in Buchenwald, has never faded,” Hymas said.

Hymas now tells his story in classrooms, houses of worship and community centers.

He said he carries the weight of the past so that those who were not there will glimpse what he saw, and understand that we must prevent such horror from happening again.

Hymas retired from the Boeing Corporation in 1998, but continues to work as hard as ever, with frequent speaking engagements at locations all over the region on behalf of the Washington Holocaust Center. He and Amy, his childhood sweetheart, have been married for 61 years.

Noémi Ban, of Bellingham, lived through some of the darkest moments of this past century, from surviving Nazi genocide to life in post-war Soviet occupation.

Ban visited Whidbey Island earlier this year to tell her war-torn life story.

At 91, her life in Bellingham is now dedicated to sharing her experiences in the hopes that such atrocities will never, ever, be repeated.

“If you see that person who it happened to, it makes a lot of difference,” Ban said.

Ban was born in Hungary as the oldest of three children. After the Germans invaded in 1944, Ban, 21 at the time, and her family were split up. Her father was sent to a labor camp, while she, her mother, grandmother and two siblings were all sent to Auschwitz, perhaps one of the most famous concentration camps of WWII.

At Auschwitz, her family members were killed, but Ban survived after being transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp four months after she arrived. At Buchenwald, Ban worked in a bomb factory.

In April 1945, she was forced to march to another concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. While en route, Ban and 11 other women escaped, a tactic she would use again later. The group was found by the U.S. Army who had just liberated the camp.

She was able to return to Hungary in September 1945, and was reunited with her father. She married Earnest Ban and became a schoolteacher.

Her family settled in Budapest, but after the Soviets came into power in 1948, Ban and her family tried to escape, fearing the growing anti-Semitism. On their second try, they successfully entered Austria; she later immigrated to the United States.

Ban has since become an award-winning teacher and speaker, most recently receiving an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Western Washington University in 2013. Ban also has written a book about her life titled “Sharing is Healing: A Holocaust Survivor’s Story,” and in 2007, a film was made about her, titled “My Name is Noémi.”

Ban said terrible things are still happening around the world, and many people ask her what should be done.

“I always say in your own community give one smile,” she said. “That is the very first step to make sure it shouldn’t happen.”