LOS ANGELES — All of 17, Mel Mermelstein wasn’t sure of his fate when he was forced to board a train bound for Auschwitz.
At the Nazi death camp, he watched soldiers lead his mother and two sisters to the showers where they’d be gassed. As the months wore on and his body withered to a skeletal 68 pounds, he learned his father had died as a slave laborer at a nearby coal mine and his brother had been fatally shot on a death march to another camp.
When the Nazi concentration camps were finally liberated and the gates swung open for all the world to finally see the atrocities that had unfolded inside, Mermelstein promised himself that he would forever be an outspoken public witness to the Holocaust.
