‘I was a walking skeleton’: 96-year-old Holocaust survivor recounts time in Nazi concentration camps

Nate Leipciger was just 15 years old when he and his family were sent to a Nazi concentration camp.

Once they arrived, he was separated from his mother and sister — and never saw them again. The life expectancy in a camp was only four months, but he and his father managed to survive for two years in several different camps.

Leipciger said he was lucky and that his mechanical competency helped keep him alive. “I could work as an electrician’s helper and do a lot electrical wiring and piping, and was quite useful.”

He said things got easier for him and his father once they managed to get relocated out of Auschwitz. The two were sent to another concentration camp and were assigned to work inside a factory, keeping them sheltered from the harsh, cold elements.

Saturday marked the 79th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the dawn of freedom for those imprisoned in the notorious death camps across Europe — but it would be several more months until Americans arrived in Leipciger’s camp and he were set free.

He adds that even after that however, things were grim.

“I was near death, I was exposed to typhus fever …  I was emaciated. I was a walking skeleton basically,” he said. “When the Americans came, it was like an unbelievable miracle that we were alive. My father and I, we embraced — and we danced, and we cried.”

Leipciger said he’s watching what is happening between Hamas and Israel closely.

“I’m almost 96 and it’s difficult to believe, that it happened, and the most difficult is that it’s happening again. That our nation, our Jewish nation, that survived the greatest of horror in the holocaust, had to be subjected again at the forces of Hamas and the attack on Israel.”