Sunday, for the first time since that June 6, Seltzer is set to walk the sands of Omaha Beach, a scene of sheer terror when he was 20, now a solemn place of remembrance.
"I know it will be an eye-opening experience after all these years," said Seltzer, a former Philadelphia resident who will be accompanied by his wife, Mildred, and a friend.
They're retracing the path Seltzer took, leaving Portsmouth, England, the same port his transport ship sailed from, along with a mighty armada on the way to France.
He plans to attend D-Day ceremonies Sunday, take a quiet walk on the beach, and remember a historic day, the beginning of the end of Hitler's Third Reich.
That anniversary will be followed by another emotional journey to the site of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Germany, where Seltzer and other liberators were among the first Americans to witness unimaginable abominations: walking skeletons, piles of emaciated bodies, and crematoriums filled with the ashes of human remains.
"When I came home, I just wanted to forget what I saw and did," said Seltzer, a past commander of the Jewish War Veterans, Department of New Jersey. "Most soldiers didn't want to talk about it . . . but it stays with you the rest of your life."
Blood-covered beach
The transport ships at Portsmouth rocked at the docks and a steady rain fell as tense GIs waited belowdecks for word of the invasion.
"We didn't get it until the evening of the 5th," Seltzer said. "You get knots in your stomach; you can't eat."
He didn't know the other soldiers on the ship with him and "felt a little awkward." An Army communications specialist with the Fourth Signal Battalion, Seltzer had just been assigned days earlier to the 29th Infantry Division.
