Tom Breslauer (pictured left)  was born on October 22, 1916 to a Jewish family that had lived in his small German town for at least 200 years. His father died a German soldier at the Battle of the Sommes during World War I, six weeks before Breslauer’s birth. His great-grandfather had served as a soldier in the Prussian Army in the 1840s.

Because of their deep roots, “Our family considered ourselves German. We didn’t pay much attention to being Jewish,” Breslauer told an audience of about 100 at the Monroe Campus on April 1, 2008.

But then came the day, March 3, 1933, when Adolph Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist Party was elected to ascendancy amidst a chaotic, unstable political environment.

“From that day on, my life changed,” Breslauer said. “I became a non-person. Children who used to play with me said ‘no, I can’t play with you; you are a Jew. My parents will lose their jobs.’ My teacher said ‘I won’t have a Jew in my classroom,’ and I had to either go to work or to a parochial school.”

Breslauer had the same experience at the shoe factory job his father helped him obtain in Hamburg. Co-workers treated him amiably until they walked out the factory door into the street outside. “Then, it was as if I didn’t exist,” he said.

In 1936, the Nuremburg Laws forbade any Jewish men to live in the same building as Christian women under the age or 45. His uncle built the family their own house and felt that the family would be safe.

On November 9, 1938, “Kristallnacht” or “Night of Broken Glass,” Jews throughout Germany saw their homes and businesses destroyed, fellow Jews beaten to death, and thousands of Jewish men forced into concentration camps. At first taken by heavily armed storm troopers to a demolished house, Breslauer and hundreds of other men were forced onto a train headed for the concentration camp Dachau.

Lying among silent, anxious men, Breslauer huddled on a thinly mattressed plank asking himself over and over “Why am I here? My father died for Germany. My great-grandfather fought for it.”

It was a question he would ask himself for the five months he endured at Dachau, which then imprisoned Jews, Gypsies, common criminals, and Seventh-Day Adventists, who were there for refusing to salute the Nazi flag or cry “heil Hitler.”

Mostly Breslauer worried about his mother and sister. His days consisted of endless marching in formation and doing ceaseless calisthenics, along with other prisoners, some of them aged. “We hooked arms with the older men and dragged them along,” he said. Those trying to escape met machine-gun fire.

When at last, he was allowed to return home, Breslauer was almost unrecognizable; he had worn the same clothes for five months and gone without a haircut or a shave. Children feared the sight of him.

Meanwhile, his mother had been searching for an affidavit for Breslauer to emigrate to the United States. By the goodness of a stranger, a Mr. Nussbaum of New York, Breslauer obtained the document, only to discover that he would have to wait for his number on a U.S. quota on Jews to come up. That didn’t happen until March 1939 and Breslauer worked in a shoe factory in England during the interim.

Barbed wire again surrounded him, however, when British authorities confined him to a prison because they suspected the German-speaking man to be a German spy shortly after the Battle of Dunkirk.

Finally, in November 1940, Breslauer’s number came up and he immigrated to the United States. He found a job, a small apartment and fell in love with a woman he soon married. Eager to become an American citizen, Breslauer obtained permanent residency and found himself drafted into the U.S. Army. Training to be an infantryman in Tyler Texas he witnessed, for the first time, racial segregation, which shocked and upset him.

Having survived Dachau, Breslauer feared he would not survive battle in World War II. Stationed in France, he considered it a lucky break when, after a time, he traded a foxhole for a seat beside a jeep-driving colonel as a German-English translator.

All the while, Breslauer continued to worry about his family in Germany. A letter from his sister assured him that she lived on in England, where she had secured a job as a housemaid. Their mother had perished, in what way his sister did not know.

It was not until 1956 that Breslauer was able to learn his mother’s fate. In that year, he saw a memorial book listing 7,000 Jewish victims of murder from Hamburg. His mother, Gertrud Breslauer, age 51, was among them. Later, Breslauer learned that she had been shot immediately upon arrival in Riga, Latvia, where she had been driven by cattle car, on December 7, 1941. “Her only crime,” said Breslauer, “was to be a Jew.”

Two years ago, Breslauer returned to Hamburg at the invitation of the city. He attended a dedication of a plaque in memory of his mother, placed upon the house where his family had lived. He received apologies from citizens and the mayor. “None of them was alive at the time of the Holocaust,” Breslauer says, “but they felt guilt.” “ ‘Yes, my background is German,’ I told them, ‘ but I am now an American.’ ” He also told them he accepted their apologies, because none had been born when the genocide took place.

Breslauer, age 91, has lived a full life since World War II. He owned a shoe business in Stroudsburg, traveled the world, had two sons, and married for a second time after his first wife died. Most phenomenal of all, he enrolled at New York University at the age of 67 and received a degree five years later.

Now he travels the region speaking to students about his experiences. He told his NCC audience, “I want you to grow up without hatred in your lives. Why do people hate? I don’t know. It happened to me. From one day to the next, I became a nobody.” He noted that hatred and genocide are occurring now, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa.

Breslauer’s audience, obviously moved by his words, listened attentively and asked questions after the talk.

“He is a strong man,” said Gladys Guardia, a business administration major from Peru. “He never quit. I am honored to have met a man like him.”

Another business administration major, Elizabeth Papillon, called him “inspirational.”

Tom Breslauer’s talk was part of a month-long Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Month sponsored by NCC Monroe.