On Holocaust Remembrance Day, a survivor shares his personal story at Stockton University
GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP, N.J. (CBS) -- Jewish people around the world Monday, including in the Philadelphia region, recognized Yom HaShoah, known as Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Stockton University held a service Monday night at Congregation Beth Israel in Northfield to remember the six million Jewish people killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Mike Kleidermacher, who survived the Holocaust as a child, served as the keynote speaker.
"Hopefully, my speech will [have people] take away that hate does not solve any problem," Kleidermacher said. "What is going to solve any problem is through understanding, peace, communication."
He was born in 1942 in Georgia, which was then a Soviet republic, after his family escaped the Nazis in Poland.
As the Nazis began to invade the Soviet Union, the Soviets placed Kleidermacher's family in cattle cars and sent them to Siberia.
"Life in Siberia was extremely difficult, very difficult," Kleidermacher said. "We had a hell of a time staying there."
Though he said it probably saved his family's life as they were far enough away from the reach of the Nazis.
"After the war, when we came back to Poland, to find out what happened, my parents found out that their whole family got killed," Kleidermacher said.
Kleidermacher eventually immigrated to South Jersey, where he's now watching protests happening on college campuses across the country, many of which, are calling for universities to divest and boycott Israel.
"Whatever you feel about Israel, you cannot be condemning all the Jewish people," Kleidermacher said. "That's what's happening right now with all this antisemitic fervor and hatred."