Jack Moran was born in Superior, Wisconsin, in 1925.
Andrew Roth was born on the other side of the world, in Penészlek, Hungary, in 1927. Earlier this month, the two men met in Los Angeles. It was not the first time that events had brought them to the same place.
"Are you the soldier who…" Roth asked from his wheelchair, reaching his hand out.
"You don't have to get up," said Moran.
Roth leaned on his cane, and stood. The two men embraced.
"I was much younger," said Roth. "So were you."
"How wonderful that you survived," said Moran.
Eight decades earlier, Roth was a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, having already survived the Auschwitz death camp and, before that, a ghetto for Eastern European Jews.
Moran was serving in the U.S. Army, when he arrived with the American military and helped liberate Buchenwald, after facing the brutal combat of the Battle of the Bulge, where he watched his best friends die.
Both men were still teenagers when they endured devastating Nazi atrocities and the horrors of war.
Now, both approaching 100 years old, Roth and Moran met to share their stories with the USC Shoah Foundation, which maintains the largest audiovisual archive of Holocaust survivor and witness testimonies.
The Nazis systematically killed an estimated six million Jews in the Holocaust. Today, just over 220,000 Holocaust survivors remain worldwide, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an organization that helps survivors receive compensation for Nazi atrocities.
Fewer and fewer first-hand witnesses remain alive to tell their stories, and the remaining survivors' memories are fading. The USC Shoah Foundation is racing against time to gather these testimonies, uncover more Holocaust history, and increase global understanding of the genocide.
"There are so few of the greatest generation or the survivor generation who are still with us," said Rob Williams, a Holocaust historian and CEO of the USC Shoah Foundation.
Williams said that even though the Holocaust has been the subject of intense historical interest over the years, many parts of that history, particularly in Eastern Europe, remain unexplored or unknown.
The testimonies of remaining survivors can help fill in the gaps.
"And if we are unable to not only record their stories, but share them with the world," Williams said, "there are aspects of this history or opportunities to build connections that may forever be lost."
'Life was so cheap and death came so easy'
Moran enlisted in the Army at 17 years old, and deployed to the battlefields of western Europe in 1944. Decades later, what is most vivid in his memory is the overwhelming loss 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," Moran said. "19 years old, 20 years old, their lives cut short."
In one battle, he lost four of his best friends.
"God spared me for some reason," he said. "Life was so cheap, and death came so easy. It was so, so sad."
During the brutal winter of 1944-1945, during the Nazi offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge, Moran said he was stuck for days in a frozen foxhole, surrounded by the German military, with no food.
"Thank God the snow was there to give us water," Moran said.
Each survival was followed by another battle, and more and more fighting.
"I saw grown men — 25 years old was a grown man to me at that time — after a battle, sitting in the corner of a barn, crying like a baby, saying 'I can't take this anymore. I can't stand this anymore,'" Moran said. "And I felt the same way. We all did. But we had to continue. We had no choice but to keep going forward, watching our friends die."
As the Army advanced into Germany, Moran began seeing signs of another kind of horror.
"In railroad yards, we found boxcars," Moran said. "We'd open up the door and inside would be six or seven-hundred suitcases that the owners never got back."
Throughout the Holocaust, the Nazis confiscated the belongings of Jewish people — who, if they were not immediately killed, were deported to ghettos and concentration camps — and used them for the German war effort. Concentration camp guards even shaved inmates' hair, which was then repurposed as insulation or raw material for German military supplies.
'I was just very resourceful, and very lucky'
In 1944, the Nazis forcibly took Andrew Roth and his Orthodox Jewish family from their small Hungarian town to a ghetto in Satu-Mare, now part of Romania.
Throughout the Holocaust, the Nazis concentrated European Jews in urban ghettos, which were marked by horrific living conditions, forced labor and the threat of execution.
Life in the ghetto did not last long.
Later that year, Roth and his family were deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland, which was equipped with gas chambers to commit murder on an industrial scale. Around one million Jews were killed at Auschwitz over the course of the Holocaust.
When Roth and his family got to Auschwitz, he recalls, the concentration camp guard was separating new arrivals into two lines.
"Rechts" and "links," Roth recalls the guard telling them — sending people either "right" or "left."
"He told me to go rechts," Roth said, 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, Roth survived on minimal rations in the cold, while performing hard labor. Death was a constant presence.
"It was so routine, you just get immune to that stuff," Roth said.
As the Soviet army approached Auschwitz, the Nazis sent Roth and other inmates to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany.
In his block was another teenager — Elie Wiesel — who would go on to write about his experience in the Holocaust in the memoir Night and later received the Nobel Peace Prize. Wiesel died in 2016.
Roth said survival often boiled down to a fight against freezing cold and starvation. At one point, he recalls discovering where the Nazis fed the German Shepherds used to guard the camp. He risked his life to take just enough dog food to remain alive.
"I was just very resourceful," Roth said, "and very lucky most of the time."
'I couldn't believe what I was seeing'
By April 1945, as the Nazi regime was collapsing, fate brought Roth and Moran together.
On April 11, inmates began to overtake the camp as the guards fled. U.S. forces arrived soon after and liberated the area. 21,000 inmates remained. 900 of them were children.
Roth said the experience of liberation was "unreal, unbelievable."
Though he was born in September, he now celebrates April 11 as his birthday.
"I couldn't believe what I was seeing — how man can seem so mean to his fellow human being," said Moran.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, invited members of Congress and journalists to visit the liberated camps, including Buchenwald, to witness firsthand the evidence of Nazi atrocities.
Roth said he remembers speaking to Germans shortly after liberation who claimed ignorance.
"They kept saying, 'wir haben das nicht gewusst,'" Roth said, meaning, "we did not know."
"It was a blatant lie," Roth said. "There was no way of ignoring it." He said that when the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims, the smoke and the smell traveled for miles.
The fight to preserve history
"By and large, knowledge of the Holocaust is decreasing," said Williams, who previously worked for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, "even in some of the countries responsible for the crimes of the Holocaust."
Understanding the Holocaust, he argues, is crucial to understanding the modern world, including the postwar institutions designed to ensure that "never again" would not be an empty promise.
International organizations like the United Nations and NATO were created in the aftermath of World War II, and international treaties on the treatment of refugees and against genocide were ratified. The word "genocide" did not exist before World War II.
Skepticism of such institutions of international cooperation have gained political traction. Authoritarian governments, such as Viktor Orban's in Hungary, have won power and undermined civil liberties. In Germany, leaders of the far-right political party Alternativ für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, have decried what they call a "cult of guilt" around the Holocaust, and questioned the country's continued reckoning with Nazi-era crimes. In the U.S., members of the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have expressed support for the AfD.
"I hate to be pessimistic, but I don't think it's any coincidence that just as we are casting doubt on the value of democracy or on the value of human rights," Williams said, "that we're also beginning to witness a decline in understanding and memory of the Holocaust."
In the U.S., violent antisemitic attacks have occurred in Boulder, Colo., and Washington, D.C. Popular online influencers with millions of followers have encouraged Holocaust denial. And multiple members of the Trump Administration have promoted antisemitic conspiracies and associated with antisemitic extremists.
Finding meaning out of horror
After the war, Roth initially moved to France before settling in the United States.
Moran returned to Wisconsin after the Allied victory in Europe, and braced for a possible deployment to the Pacific. When news of Japan's surrender came over the radio, he sobbed with relief.
Both men settled in California and started families. They still carry their stories of the war.
The process of gathering oral histories, Williams said, isn't just valuable for historians, but is meaningful for the survivors as well.
Moran said he was moved by his meeting with Roth.
"That anybody survives those camps is a wonderful thing," Moran said. "And I'm so happy to meet him."
During their meeting, Williams was able to share an artifact from Roth's liberation — the official questionnaire he filled out for the U.S. Military Government.
Roth said he had never seen it.
"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 is written in the blunt language of military bureaucracy.
It lists the dates of his confinement at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Under the line "Reason For Arrest," the document states plainly in cursive lettering:
"Being a Jew."
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