70 Years After Walking Free From A Concentration Camp, A NJ Professor Gives His Eyewitness Account
By Cleve Bryan
VINELAND, NJ (CBS) – Dr. Murray Kohn was 12-years-old when the Nazis took him and about 80 relatives from their Polish ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp.
His mother and little sister died in the gas chambers the first night.
"When you ask me how did you survive? I say God knows, I don't," says Dr. Kohn who lives in Vineland.
Kohn and his father were forced into slave labor for two and a half years until the end of World War II.
"People literally walked and fell dead," recalls Kohn who began teaching Holocaust Studies in 1980 at Stockton University, then Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
Kohn founded the program which now has 19 courses each semester and about a thousand students, making it the largest Holocaust Studies program in the world.
On Monday, May 4 the 86-year-old will have a retirement reception in the University's F Wing Atrium located adjacent to the Library on the main campus in Galloway.