Holocaust Survivor and Liberator Reunited 80 Years Later

Andrew Roth, a Holocaust survivor, and Jack Moran, a U.S. Army veteran who helped liberate concentration camps, recently shared an emotional reunion in Los Angeles, eighty years after their lives intersected during World War II.

Mr. Roth, born in Hungary in 1927, was a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp, having endured Auschwitz and a Jewish ghetto. Mr. Moran, born in Wisconsin in 1925, was a soldier who helped liberate Buchenwald after fighting in the brutal Battle of the Bulge. Both men were teenagers when they experienced the horrors of war and Nazi atrocities.

Their meeting, facilitated by the USC Shoah Foundation, allowed them to share their stories for its audiovisual archive. The Shoah Foundation is racing against time to record these testimonies as fewer Holocaust survivors remain. Rob Williams, CEO of the USC Shoah Foundation, emphasized the urgency: “There are so few of the greatest generation or the survivor generation who are still with us.”

Mr. Moran recounted the devastating losses he and his fellow soldiers endured. “I saw so many nice young fellows laying in the ditches of France, and in the snow of Belgium, and in the woods of Germany,” Mr. Moran said. “19 years old, 20 years old, their lives cut short.” He also recalled, “Life was so cheap, and death came so easy. It was so, so sad.” He described being stuck for days in a frozen foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge, surrounded by German military, with no food. “Thank G-d the snow was there to give us water,” Mr. Moran said. As the Army advanced into Germany, he began seeing signs of another kind of horror. “In railroad yards, we found boxcars,” he said. “We’d open up the door and inside would be six or seven-hundred suitcases that the owners never got back.”

Mr. Roth shared his harrowing experience at Auschwitz, where a seemingly random decision to follow his uncle saved his life. When a concentration camp guard separated new arrivals into two lines, telling them “Rechts” and “links,” he recalled, “He told me to go rechts,” to follow his mother and siblings. But he saw his uncle and a cousin going to the left. “Without thinking,” he said, he decided to follow his uncle, “not realizing that I made a life and death choice. All those who went to the right were gassed the same night. And I went with my uncle the other way. And here I am.” With most of his family murdered, Mr. Roth survived on minimal rations in the cold, performing hard labor. “It was so routine, you just get immune to that stuff,” he said. He even risked his life for dog food, taking “just enough dog food to remain alive.” he said, “I was just very resourceful, and very lucky most of the time.”

On April 11, 1945, the day inmates began to overtake Buchenwald as guards fled, U.S. forces, including Mr. Moran, arrived. Mr. Roth described the experience of liberation as “unreal, unbelievable,” and now celebrates April 11 as his birthday. Mr. Moran said, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing — how man can seem so mean to his fellow human being.” Mr. Roth remembered speaking to Germans shortly after liberation who claimed ignorance. “They kept saying, ‘wir haben das nicht gewusst,'” he said, meaning, “we did not know.” “It was a blatant lie,” he said. “There was no way of ignoring it.”

After the war, both men settled in California and started families. Mr. Moran was moved by their meeting: “That anybody survives those camps is a wonderful thing,” he said. “And I’m so happy to meet him.”

During their meeting, Williams presented Mr. Roth with his official U.S. Military Government questionnaire from liberation. Roth had never seen it before. “Being able to share those documents is, in a certain sense, a way to let him reclaim his own history,” said Williams, “a history that was ripped away from him by the Nazis.” The questionnaire plainly stated the “Reason For Arrest” as: “Being a Jew.”