A Holocaust Survivor

To commemorate Yom Hashoah, the somber day of the year that Jews come together to remember the millions killed in the Holocaust, the religious school where I teach invited a survivor to speak to the children.
Mr. Kaufman was born in 1920 and he didn't look a day over 75. He told us that he had a very ordinary childhood, but when the Nazis took power in 1933, things changed drastically. He saw first-hand how Jews were denied education, jobs, and how they were relegated to second class citizens. This made me think of how not long ago African Americans had to live through the evils of Jim Crow, separated from other Americans by law and deprived of so many privileges enjoyed by whites.
Mr. Kaufman described how he was arrested along with tens of thousands of other German Jewish Jews as a means of "protection" after Kristallnacht - the night of broken glass that happened on the night of November 9th - 10th, 1938. The Nazis burned down hundreds of synagogues, ransacked Jewish homes, and shattered the storefront windows of every Jewish shopkeeper they could find.
Mr. Kaufman was imprisoned simply for being Jewish, and shortly afterwards, the Gestapo sent him by train to Buchenwald, later a notorious death factory. While he was there, he saw men hanged and beaten for the slightest infraction. He even saw a man killed after being rolled down a hill in a spiked barrel, only to have German shepherds devour him as he lay bleeding.
Soon after he was released, he luckily got an American sponsor to take him in. Had he stayed in Germany, he certainly would have been killed. He went on to serve in the U.S. army where he worked in intelligence, eventually earning the rank of major.