Holocaust survivor Sami Steigmann spoke to a near-capacity crowd of Mississippi State University students, faculty and Starkville residents on Wednesday in Lee Hall about the severe injustices he and millions of others faced during World War Two.
He provided a message of tolerance for unifying cultures around the world.
In 1941, Steigmann and his parents were taken from their home in Romania and transported to a forced labor camp in Ukraine when he was one and a half years old.
Although the work camp was part of then-Nazi Germany's continent-wide extermination, labor and concentration camp network, his family was seized by the Nazi-affiliated Romanian government.
"I was a survivor of the Holocaust and a child of Holocaust survivors," Steigmann said.
Being too young to work at the camp, he was subjected to medical experiments that still cause him severe head, neck and back pain. No official medical records of the tests were ever made available to him, he said.
In 2004, Steigmann was compensated with around $5,300 from the German government as an acknowledgement of the extreme injustices he faced.
"Even now I have constant pain," Steigmann said.
Of the 42 relatives on his father's side, only two survived the Holocaust, he said.
It is estimated over 12 million people from a wide range of ethnic, religious and political backgrounds were killed from 1933 to 1945 across Europe. Around 6 million Jews were killed during that time by the Nazis.
In 1944, the Ukrainian work camp was liberated by Soviet troops.
Shortly before the camp's liberation, he recalled nearly starving to death only to have a still-anonymous woman risk her life to give him milk. Steigmann paid tribute to the woman known along with other citizens who helped those in camps across Europe as the "Righteous Among the Nations," at Israel's Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
After living in Israel, Steigmann moved to the U.S. and was homeless for a brief period in the '90s, living off of Social Security benefits in Manhattan.
Shortly after giving a speech at a school in New York around 2008, Steigmann knew he had to spread his message of understanding to younger generations.
"A student wrote me a letter," Steigmann said. "That letter inspired me after I spoke at their school and it drove me to reach as many people as I can."
By forgiving the world for not intervening sooner during the Holocaust, he differentiated between bystanders and perpetrators, hoping that no matter what age, the remaining Holocaust perpetrators face their day in court, Steigmann said.
"Never be a bystander," Steigmann said. "Be active and be part of the solution."
He warned of half-truths told by Holocaust deniers as a danger to educating younger generations about one of the most deplorable moments in modern history. By finding niche areas online, deniers are able to create communities based on ideology, not facts, he said.
"They claim there were no gas chambers at the concentration camps," Steigmann said. "There were no gas chambers at the concentration camps, only at the death camps. This is an example of a half truth told by some Holocaust deniers."
He hoped his talk would inspire others to pass on his message of peace and tolerance.
"I was a victim of discrimination," Steigmann said. "But I am also a survivor and a witness. We are one people."