FALL RIVER — For decades, Milton Silva didn’t talk much about his military career, and it isn’t hard to understand why.

Before the morning of April 11, 1945, few people understood what “concentration camp” meant. Silva would be one of the first to learn, and he had the misfortune of having to learn it firsthand.

Years after serving in the U.S. Army’s 120th Evacuation Hospital unit, he would recount the discovery of Buchenwald with a kind of restrained horror. He would describe the bodies as having been “stacked up like cord wood” and how the smell of death lingered in the air before the camp was in sight.

“We didn’t say a hell of a lot,” Silva would tell an author years after his time in the war. “We all had a great deal of anger.”

Rather than use that anger destructively, Silva re-purposed it as fuel for a lifetime of public service. Out of the literal ashes of one of humanity’s greatest tragedies rose one of the most beloved public servants the city of Fall River has known.

“The shocking inhumanity he saw on display there never left him,” said Judge Philip Rapoza, who succeeded Silva as presiding justice of the Second District Court of Bristol County in 1992. “That experience shaped his sense of justice, compassion and fairness, both as a judge but also throughout his entire lifetime.”

Silva, a Swansea resident, passed away peacefully at home Feb. 14 at 96. What preceded was nearly a century of life spent at the heart of human struggle.

In addition to his 20 years on the bench, Silva served as Fall River’s state representative, a member of the school committee, a dedicated immigrant advocate and an exuberant saxophone player in various community bands and orchestras.

The word that comes up again and again from his friends, colleagues and family members is “fair.”

“He was very proud of the fact that he treated people like he wanted to be treated,” said Silva’s son, Paul Silva. “He took the position that everyone deserved a second chance and he went out of his way to do that.”

Taking this way of thinking to heart, Silva would found a new “second chances” diversion program to help ensure first-time offenders’ lives weren’t derailed by one-time incidents.

Rapoza describes his predecessor and mentor as having been the “face of justice” in Fall River for 20 years, but Silva's early life suggested a very different trajectory.

As the American-born son of Portuguese immigrants who ran a funeral home, it was often assumed Silva would continue the family business. Though he graduated from embalming school and took over the funeral home following the unexpected death of his father in 1955, Silva began taking law classes in his spare time at Suffolk University, eventually passing the Massachusetts Bar exam in 1955.

He later went on to serve as a Fall River District Court judge from 1971 to 1991.

Though she never knew him personally, UMass Dartmouth history professor Dr. Paula Celeste Gomes Noversa said it was hard to grow up as a Portuguese kid in Fall River and not know about Judge Silva.

“Even then, to see someone of Portuguese descent being appointed as a judge brings home the idea that the Portuguese were really moving up in the community. They were attaining positions of power and prestige,” she said. “If you’re a kid in an immigrant family, and you’re in middle school or high school thinking about whether you could go to college, here was an example of someone you could look at and know you could.”

As faculty director of UMass Dartmouth's Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives, Gomes Noversa oversees a large collection of items from Silva’s life and career. In the archives, you can find medals from his military service, bumper stickers from his state representative campaign and the gavel he used as a judge. You can also find evidence of his nickname, “Not Guilty Milty.”

Originally used by some in a more critical fashion, the nickname was assigned to Silva during a particularly difficult point in his time on the bench. Police practices, particularly evidence collection, were being revised across the country during the 1970s and, thanks to the recent passing of the Miranda Act, new attention had to be paid to informing suspects of their rights.

Silva stood by these new laws, even when enforcing them didn’t make him popular among other local members of the law enforcement community.

“Because of these changes, many pieces of evidence had to be excluded at trial and numerous criminal prosecutions were unsuccessful. For some time, police and prosecutors held him responsible, but in time they realized that anger was misplaced and Judge Silva was just doing his job,” said Rapoza. “In the end, the nickname proved to be one used effectively to recognize a man who was being very fair.”

This point was echoed by Bristol County District Attorney Thomas Quinn III.

“He was highly regarded by anyone who appeared before him,” Quinn said of Silva. “That was in large part due to his fairness, but also because he was a very good person.”

To ensure that members of law enforcement were complying with and understanding new regulations, Silva often volunteered to teach officers classes on subjects such as proper evidence collection.

Jim Smith, a retired Somerset police chief who often appeared before Silva for different cases, recalled that the judge might not have always ruled the way he and his colleagues hoped, but they would at least understand his reasoning for it.

He recounted one case in which Silva found a suspect he’d arrested as not having been guilty of a disorderly conduct charge because Smith had not specified the exact nature of the suspect’s conduct.

“It was a learning moment for me,” said Smith, who described Silva as an important teacher at a time when police training and academy requirements were much more relaxed than they are today. “Back in those days, you might not have gone through the academy until you had been on for a few years ... but (Silva) was always very easy to work with.”

Outside the courtroom, Silva often helped immigrant families break through bureaucratic red tape. A clerical error on one case enraged him to the point that he drove from Massachusetts to Toronto just to argue with the Portuguese consulate that a family was authorized to enter the United States.

Silva only started to reference his military service, particularly his participation in the liberation of Buchenwald, when he saw a new form of injustice cropping up: the prevalence of Holocaust denial conspiracy theories, according to son Paul Silva.

“My father was so pissed that he got out all these pictures he had been shielding from us for years and he went on the speaking circuit,” Paul Silva said.

Silva attended speaking engagements and was interviewed at length about his experiences at Buchenwald, going as far as to provide photographs he had taken during the liberation to document that physical proof and eye-witness testimony of the Holocaust existed.

“It was an experience that stuck with him his whole life,” said Paul Silva. “He credited it with how he would come to treat people. He could never get over the inhumanity that he saw there.”

Looking back on Silva’s life, Gomes Noversa said “Not Guilty Milty” should be remembered not for any one moment but for the collective impact his life represented.

“Milton Silva’s story is the story of America. It’s the American success story,” she said. “What his life shows is that he wasn’t just dedicated to a job. He was dedicated to a community, and that’s why I think his story is worth telling.”