The Fog of War and Humanity, hosted by Richard Acritelli for the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, presents a powerful conversation with Irving “Irv” Adler, tracing his family’s journey from the Holocaust to a rebuilt life in America.
Adler begins with his upbringing in Brooklyn, where his parents, immigrants from Czechoslovakia, created a stable, working-class life within a decade of arriving. His father, once orphaned at age eight and forced to survive alone, became a successful businessman. Yet behind that success was a past never fully spoken, only revealed in fragments—most visibly in the number tattooed on his father’s arm.
That past came into sharper focus as Adler learned of his parents’ wartime experiences. Married in 1940, they were quickly separated when his father was sent to forced labor. By 1944, Nazi forces had reached their region, forcing Jewish families into ghettos before deporting them in crowded cattle cars to Auschwitz.
Upon arrival, Adler’s parents were separated. Both were selected for labor, a decision that saved their lives. In one of the most devastating moments, Adler’s mother, holding her infant daughter, was quietly told to give the child to her own mother if she wanted to survive. She never saw them again.
Adler’s father endured multiple labor camps and brutal evacuations as the war neared its end, surviving freezing transport conditions that killed many. His mother was forced into hard labor in munitions camps. Survival, Adler emphasized, was not strength, but luck—being in the right place at the right moment.
After liberation by Allied forces, the two eventually found each other through scattered survivor networks. They briefly returned home but fled again as Soviet control tightened, arriving in the United States in 1948 with nothing.
In America, they rebuilt. They embraced opportunity, religious freedom, and security, though the trauma never fully left them. Adler described a life shaped by both resilience and lingering fear.
His message is clear: survival carries responsibility. Remember history, oppose hatred, and protect the freedoms so many fought to reclaim. To see the entire interview, visit hmTV.