As many as 1.5 million children 1.2 million of them Jewish died in the Holocaust.
At Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi killing camps, only 52 children under age 8 survived.
I was one of them.
My paternal grandmother, Dora, protected me fiercely.
Since I was so small, I don’t have a lot of memories of life in the camp.
I remember the smell of the air it was the smell of burning flesh.
I remember Nazis shouting at me in German.
And when I go on crowded subways, it reminds me of the cattle car ride to the camp.
But most of the things I remember are stories my relatives told me after the war.
She showed me the scars on her head.
She eventually got sent to a different camp.
We ended up sleeping in a chicken coop.
But we did find my mother there.
Not so my father, brother and maternal grandparents: They were all killed by the Nazis.
But my mother never gave up her optimism for the future.
I still have a watch she gave me.
On the back it says, in Hebrew, This, too, shall pass."
I was 10 years old.
I worked in a drugstore for 25 cents an hour.
I got my U.S. citizenship when I was 17.
I cannot think of a better country to live in.
Still, I wasn’t always safe from anti-Semitism here.
He obviously didn’t know I was Jewish.
Hate is hard to erase.
That kind of open discrimination got quieter over time, but I see it rising up again.
I’m the father I never got to know."
As I write these words, I plan to travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau on Jan. 27.
I really dread going back there, but I will have a lot of support from other survivors.
Those of us who were there need to testify to what happens when evil and bigotry go ignored.
I definitely think something like the Holocaust could happen again.
People are people, and there are dictators in this world.
If they need a scapegoat, they can find a scapegoat.
My life’s dream was to create the kind of family I never got to have as a child.
I’m the father I never got to know.
Hate did not win.
I truly believe the best revenge has been to live a life of happiness.
As told to Barbara Leap
Michael Bornstein, 79, is a retired biotech scientist.
