Naftali Fürst, 92, is returning to Auschwitz for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi’s most notorious death camp, his fourth trip to the camp. Each time he returns, he thinks of those first moments, when his family arrived. “We knew we were going to certain death,” he said from his home in Haifa, northern Israel, earlier this month. “In Slovakia, we knew that people who went to Poland didn’t return.” But Fürst and his family arrived at the entrance to Auschwitz on November 3, 1944 – one day after Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the cessation of the use of the gas chambers ahead of their demolition, as the Soviet troops neared. The order meant that his family wasn’t immediately killed. It was a stroke of luck, one of many small bits of luck and coincidences that allowed Fürst to survive. “For 60 years, I didn’t talk about the Holocaust, for 60 years I didn’t speak a word of German even though it’s my mother tongue,” said Fürst. In 2005, he was invited to attend the ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, where Fürst was liberated on April 11, 1944. He realized there were fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors who could give first-person accounts, and decided to throw himself into memorial work. This will be his fourth trip to a ceremony at Auschwitz, having also met Pope Francis there in 2016. Nearly 6 million European Jews were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust — the mass murder of Jews and other groups before and during World War II. Soviet Red Army troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau on Jan. 27, 1945, and the day has become known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “There were many moments of despair in Auschwitz-Birkenau, at any place. On the Death March we had to walk while hungry, wet, with no purpose, with no knowledge where we are going to, how long we will walk, and we saw that those left behind were immediately killed, were shot,” Fürst recalled. Fürst and his brother survived the march, but they were separated at the next camp. When Fürst was liberated from Buchenwald, captured in a famous photo that included Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel in the bunkbeds, he was sure he was alone in the world. But within months, just as Fürst's father had instructed, the four family members reunited at the address they memorized. The rest of their family – grandparents, aunts, uncles, were all killed. His family later moved to Israel, where he married, had a daughter and four grandchildren. On Oct. 7, 2023, Fürst awoke to the Hamas attack on southern Israel, and immediately thought of his granddaughter, Mika Peleg, and her husband, and their two-year-old son, who live in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz on the border with Gaza. No one in the family could get in touch with the family. Towards midnight on Oct. 7, Mika’s neighbors sent word that the family had survived. They spent almost 20 hours locked inside their safe room with no food or ability to communicate. Her husband’s parents, who both lived on Kfar Aza, were killed. Despite his close connection, comparisons between Oct. 7 and the Holocaust make Fürst uncomfortable. “It’s awful and terrible and a catastrophe, and hard to describe, but it’s not a Holocaust,” he said. As awful as the Hamas attack was for his granddaughter and others, the Holocaust was a multi-year “death industry” with massive infrastructure and camps that could kill 10,000 people a day for months at a time, he said. Fürst, who was previously involved in coexistence work between Jews and Arabs, said his heart also goes out to Palestinians in Gaza, although he believes Israel needed to respond militarily. Fürst knows that he is one of very few Holocaust survivors still able to travel to Auschwitz, so it’s important for him to be present there to mark the 80th anniversary. These days, he is telling his story as many times as he can, taking part in documentaries and movies, serving as the president of the Buchenwald Prisoner’s Association and working to create a memorial statue at the Sered concentration camp in Slovakia. He feels a responsibility to be the mouthpiece for the millions who were killed, and people can relate to the story of a single person more than the hard numbers of 6 million deaths, he said.