TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

When he was 12, living in a small wine-making town in what's now the Czek Republic, William Harvey heard a chilling broadcast.

"I heard Hitler speak on the radio to the world, and he said: 'I'm going to kill every Jew in the world,'" Harvey told more than 200 Bakersfield residents Sunday at a Holocaust Memorial Day service held at Temple Beth El.

It was 1936. "Naturally, when we heard Hitler's speech on the radio we didn't take it seriously," recalled Harvey, now 85 and living in Los Angles.

He and most of his family were hauled off to German concentration camps several years later.

When the train arrived in his town, "the sliding door of the cattle car opened," Harvey said. "When the car filled with people, the sliding door slammed closed on us."

Four days later, the doors opened in a strange place with "big chimneys going to the sky."

It was the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, he learned. He later survived a stint at the Buchenwald death camp and time on a work crew cleaning up after Allied bombings. When he was liberated by American troops in spring 1945, he weighed just 72 pounds.

While sharing his story, Harvey was at times halted by floods of emotion.

Bakersfield's annual Shoa observance combines memberships of Temple Beth El and B'nai Jacob Synagogue and includes Christian visitors.

Jeff Russinsky, a Temple Beth El member, said he has studied the Holocaust in detail.

"Still, to hear it from one who experienced it -- it hits you between the eyes every time," Russinsky said.

His father, Russinsky added, served in the U.S. Army's Rainbow Division, which helped liberate 30,000 inmates at the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945.

During the Holocaust, from 1933-1945, some six million Jews were slaughtered under the Nazis' state-sponsored extermination program. Millions more, including Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war and other ethnic and political groups were also murdered, Bakersfield Mayor Harvey Hall said in a proclamation given before the service.

While Harvey and his siblings survived World War II, his mother and father perished in the concentration camps along with some aunts, cousins and their children.

Harvey moved to New York, then California, and became a successful cosmetologist. His long-time wife died of cancer.

He has two daughters and four grandsons whom he considers the greatest success his life.

"The material things don't mean a thing," Harvey told the gathering. What's important is "what impact you leave behind you on people's lives," he said.