80 years later, a Holocaust survivor meets an American soldier who helped free him

toggle caption Grace Widyatmadja/for NPR

Jack Moran was born in Superior, Wisconsin, in 1925.

Andrew Roth was born on the other side of the world, in Penészlek, Hungary, in 1927. Earlier this month, the two men met in Los Angeles. It was not the first time that events had brought them to the same place.

"Are you the soldier who…" Roth asked from his wheelchair, reaching his hand out.

"You don't have to get up," said Moran.

Roth leaned on his cane, and stood. The two men embraced.

"I was much younger," said Roth. "So were you."

"How wonderful that you survived," said Moran.

Eight decades earlier, Roth was a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, having already survived the Auschwitz death camp and, before that, a ghetto for Eastern European Jews.

Moran was serving in the U.S. Army, when he arrived with the American military and helped liberate Buchenwald, after facing the brutal combat of the Battle of the Bulge, where he watched his best friends die.

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Both men were still teenagers when they endured devastating Nazi atrocities and the horrors of war.

toggle caption Grace Widyatmadja for NPR

Now, both approaching 100 years old, Roth and Moran met to share their stories with the USC Shoah Foundation, which maintains the largest audiovisual archive of Holocaust survivor and witness testimonies.

The Nazis systematically killed an estimated six million Jews in the Holocaust. Today, just over 220,000 Holocaust survivors remain worldwide, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an organization that helps survivors receive compe