Ben Lesser was born October 18, 1928 in Krakow, Poland.  Ben grew up in a family of seven, of which only two would survive the Shoah.  As a ten year old boy Ben witnessed the German invasion of his country, and he vividly remembers the Wehrmacht marching through the streets of Krakow.  Violence began to unfold around the Lesser family within a matter of days, and soon Ben’s father lost his business and the family learned they would be deported to the Krakow ghetto.  They were fortunate to get out of Krakow though, and they went to the nearby community of Niepolomice, and then to Bochnia.  They managed to stay ahead of the terrible violence in each location, though they did witness the horrors all around them. In the Bochnia ghetto they experienced overcrowding, slave labour and starvation – and the brutality of the liquidation.  Everyone who had survived in the family’s hiding place walked out to a gruesome sight. There were corpses and pieces of body parts all throughout the streets. Rather than being able to mourn or give proper burials to the deceased, survivors were forced to pile the bodies up before the Nazis set them on fire.  In time, Ben and his family were able to move into an apartment outside of the ghetto due to the Hungarian Citizenship cards that Lola had obtained for the entire family.  And that is where the family planned to go, and they set in motion a daring escape involving a coal truck with a false bottom.  Working with a smuggler, Ben and many family members succeeded in making it to Hungary, where much of the family was reunited.  Ben advised his uncle to convert his assets into diamonds knowing the possibility of a drastic change coming soon. His uncle took it a step further by having the diamonds hidden with pairs of shoes he got for the entire family.  In early 1944 the Nazis invaded Hungary and again the Lesser family was within their sights: everything that happened within Krakow was happening again, and this time, the Nazis told them they were being sent to a labour camp.  The infamous deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau began for Hungarian Jews at this time, and Ben and his remaining family were forced into one of the horrific cattle cars.  After a terrible journey of 3 days, they arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau and were subjected to one of the infamous selections, where Ben lost his little brother and sister. He spent several terrible weeks there, and in June 1944, Ben was transported to a rock quarry labor camp in Durnhau. The labor camp was a sub-camp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp:  there Ben and his uncle were subjected to brutal physical labour and beatings.  A death march at war’s end followed as Ben ended up in the Buchenwald sub camps and later Dachau, where he would be liberated by the Americans.  He went on to a long convalescence, slowly regaining his physical and emotional strength.  Later Ben opted to emigrate to America, where he rebuilt his life and started his own family – his American Dream.  Crestwood students interviewed Ben Lesser over zoom at his home in Las Vegas in March 2025.