Surviving the Holocaust

Join Ann Curry as Holocaust survivors search for those who gave them hope in the darkest days. One wants to find the friend he left behind when he didn’t move to Israel; the other hopes an old photo will reunite him with the girl who was his first friend.

Ninety-year-old Holocaust survivor Benjamin Lesser describes losing his family in the horrors of the concentration camps during WWII. He’s looking for the fellow survivor who became like a brother to him. Ben Alalouf describes arriving in the USA in 1944 on the USS Henry Gibbons, a troop carrier sent to help Jews fleeing the Nazis.

Holocaust survivor Benjamin Lesser describes arriving on a cattle car at Auschwitz concentration camp. He recounts seeing the ashes on the ground and not knowing what they were. A Nazi officer tells Benjamin that it is the ashes of Jewish bodies that have been burned. Benjamin not only loses his younger brother and sister to this fate, but is also threatened that a similar horror awaits him.

Ben Alalouf describes arriving with his family in Naples in 1944 having been on the run for three years from the Nazis. There he was lucky enough to get a place on the USS Henry Gibbons, an American troop carrier that had been sent to rescue nearly a thousand refugees.

Jewish Refugee Ben Alalouf tells of his arrival at an old military camp in Oswego, New York in 1944. He and his family were so relieved to at last be safe, having run for their lives across Europe with the Nazi forces on their heels. The camp was later called “Safe Haven” and for nearly a year Ben developed a friendship with a little girl called “Seka.”

When liberation finally came Benjamin was so exhausted and malnourished that he simply collapsed. He describes waking up two months later in St. Ottilien, a monastery in Germany that had been made into a make-shift hospital. There he met another young holocaust survivor, Moshe Opatovski who, like him, had lost everything in the Holocaust.