Holocaust survivor meets the soldier who saved him 80 years ago — and their hug said it all

Andrew Roth, a Holocaust survivor, and Jack Moran, an ex-WWII Army staff sergeant, had nothing in common except that they were destined to meet each other. So, amidst uncertainty, the universe brought them together at what we call one of the darkest corners of humanity — Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp in Germany. Well, Roth was already a prisoner there, and Moran, who was then serving in the U.S. Army, had reportedly arrived with his troops to liberate Buchenwald, from the Nazi atrocities. But long after they had moved on in their lives, probably forgetting about each other's existence, fate again got them together, and this time, for an interview with the USC Shoah Foundation (@uscshoahfoundation on YouTube).

"Are you the soldier who...Buchenwald?" Roth asked, and Moran just nodded in response. "Can I hug you?" Roth asked again, and that very moment spoke volumes about how grateful he was to meet the sole reason for his survival. When Dr. Rob Williams, the CEO of the USC Shoah Foundation and the host of the "Searching for Never Again" podcast, asked what it was like for a liberator to meet a Holocaust survivor, Moran kept it short and responded by calling it a heartwarming experience. But Roth had an elaborate answer, which he began by first narrating how he met Moran for the first time in the Nazi camp.

He said, "This soldier comes up to me. He spoke English, and I looked up, and I saw an American uniform with a little American flag here (pointing at his chest). I don't remember anything after that, and it was Jack." Notably, Moran and Roth came from two different worlds; while Moran had a normal childhood growing up with his best friend in Hungary, Moran, born in Wisconsin, got into the army as a 17-year-old and was deployed in western Europe in 1944. "I saw so many nice young fellows lying in the ditches of France, and in the snow of Belgium, and in the woods of Germany. 19 years old, 20 years old, their lives cut short," Moran shared, recalling the devastating loss of young people, especially his soldier friends.

"God spared me for some reason. Life was so cheap, and death came so easily. It was so, so sad," he added. Despite seeing so many of his friends die in front of his eyes, Moran said they had no choice but to move forward and save the innocents. Meanwhile, in 1944, when Roth and his family were captured by the Nazis in Hungary and deported to Auschwitz in Poland, it was equipped with gas chambers to execute a bigger mass. When they arrived there, the guard was sending people in two different directions, and fortunately, unlike his mother and siblings, Roth followed his uncle and a cousin going to the left. He didn't realize he had made a life-and-death choice because everyone who went the other way was killed the same night.

But everything changed by April 1945, when the guards began abanoding the Nazi camp, and prisoners took charge. Shortly after, the American soldiers arrived to officially free the 21,000 surviving inmates. Roth, who was also one of those, called the experience "unreal, unbelievable." Honoring the second chance at life, Roth, who is actually a September-born, now celebrates his birthday on April 11 every year. Unlike Roth, the Holocaust Encyclopedia reports that the Nazis and their allies brutally murdered 6 million Jewish people, and it's safe to say it's one of the biggest, most horrifying crimes that humanity has ever seen.