Holocaust survivor’s first act of freedom was to embrace forgiveness

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When someone has “put you through hell” it’s often hard to forgive. But Holocaust survivor David Kaplan, who spent four years in a concentration camp, has made forgiving Hitler and the Nazis look easy. “I stop, I relax and then I don’t hate them anymore,” Kaplan, 88, said recently in an emotional interview at the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center. Born on July 20, 1928 in Kaunas, Lithuania, the retired businessman is one of about 35 Holocaust survivors who settled in El Paso after the Second World War and one of just a few still alive in El Paso. When the Nazis and Adolph Hitler rose to power in Germany when he was a child in Lithuania, he and his parents and siblings were forced to move into a small house in the Slobodka Ghetto.

El Paso’s Holocaust Museum celebrates the life of a child who survived the Nazi concentration camps

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EL PASO — Seventy years ago the life of a 12-year-old Jewish kid from Lithuania completely changed when he was forced to fight for his survival in Nazi concentration camps and finally battled his way through the final Death March as the war ended. Today that boy is a successful businessman living in the border region of El Paso, TX, and he continues drawing strength to share his inspiring story of survival and forgiveness with the community who gathered along with family and friends to commemorate his 82nd birthday. On August 28, 2011 the Holocaust Museum here presented Kaplan’s memoir, I Forgive Them, which he wrote with the help of David Smith-Soto, a journalism professor at The University of Texas at El Paso. In it Kaplan tells the story of his four years of struggle during World War II. At the event Kaplan and Smith-Soto were interviewed by Darren Hunt, host of ABC-7 Xtra, about the book’s meaning to them.