Surviving the Holocaust: The Story of Joseph Kahn
Joseph Kahn was born in Poland in 1922 and grew up in a vibrant, religious Jewish community. By the time he was a teenager, antisemitism in Europe was rapidly escalating. As news spread of Hitler’s rise, the mood darkened. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, everything in Joseph’s world collapsed within days.
Soon after the German occupation, the synagogue in his town was burned with people inside. Joseph, still just 17, was forced to help gather the bodies for mass burial. Food became scarce, violence became routine, and the ghetto was sealed under constant terror. Anyone caught outside after curfew risked being killed on the spot — a fate Joseph narrowly escaped more than once.
In 1942, the SS carried out a massive selection. Thousands of Jews from his town and surrounding villages were forced onto a football field for days, without food or shelter. Those sent left were taken directly to Auschwitz. Joseph and a few relatives were spared only because they worked in a factory the Germans took over.
Eventually, he was captured, separated from his family, and sent through a chain of camps before arriving at a sub-camp of Auschwitz used for forced labor. Conditions were brutal — starvation rations, constant beatings, public hangings, and daily threats of death. Yet even within that world, small acts of humanity stood out: prisoners who tried to help one another, and even rare guards who showed unexpected kindness.
In 1945, with the Allies closing in, the Nazis evacuated the camp on a death march. Thousands started; less than half survived. Joseph trudged through deep snow with no food, watching people collapse and die beside him. At the end of the march, the prisoners were loaded into cattle cars — starving, freezing, and trapped among the dead and dying.
On April 29, 1945, American forces liberated the train. Joseph was too weak to walk and fainted in the mud. A German woman pulled him from the line, brought him into her home, and cared for him until American military police transferred him to a hospital. He spent nearly five years recovering from tuberculosis before finally immigrating to the United States in 1950.
Joseph rebuilt his life from nothing — arriving with twenty dollars, no English, and severe illness — eventually creating a family, career, and future far from the world that tried to destroy him.
When asked how he survived, he said simply:
“Sheer luck. And the will to keep breathing.”
And when asked whether such hatred could happen again, Joseph did not hesitate:
“Definitely. Hatred is a disease in humanity.”
His story stands as a reminder — not just of what was, but of what must never be allowed to happen again.