Andre Kessler, was hidden away as a child spoke at Monday's Holocaust Remembrance. Photo by Charmain Z. Brackett Years ago while watching a dramatization of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s life on television, Andre Kessler, 70, paused to observe his mother.

“In the movie, he (Wiesenthal) said he’d lost 70 family members during the Holocaust,” said Kessler, the keynote speaker at Monday’s Days of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust Command Program at Alexander Hall. “My mother was counting. She said, ‘I can only remember 120.’”

For Kessler, that meant 120 aunts, uncles and cousins who’d perished in Adolf Hitler’s gas chambers during World War II. His mother was from a family of six, and his father had a dozen siblings. Kessler said he should have had many cousins but didn’t.

Kessler was born in Romania in March 1940. His parents were very stubborn individuals, he said. When the Romanian laws decreed Jews must sew a Star of David to their clothing, Kes- sler’s mother refused, despite the punishment of death should she have been questioned.

“My mother did not have the stereotypical look. She had blonde hair and blue eyes,” he said.

As hostilities against the Jews increased, his father was arrested and taken to a labor camp, and Kessler and his mother went into hiding in a tiny apartment. They spent 18 months in the room with its windows darkened and a blanket pushed under the door so light and sound would not be noticed.

After the war, Kessler’s father returned. He’d lost 114 pounds from his 246-pound frame leaving him unrecognizable to his son. The owner of two shirt factories in Romania, Kessler’s father returned to work only to have the government come in and tell him his company had been nationalized.

The family was smuggled out of the country, but before he left, his father blew up his shirt factories.

The Kesslers made their way to America where Kessler joined the Navy. After more than two years in the Navy, he attended New York University and went on to play professional basketball for the Philadelphia Warriors. His roommate was Wilt Chamberlain.

Because of an injury, Kessler only spent a few years playing basketball. He has lived in Atlanta since the mid-1960s.

Kessler is a partner with Atlanta’s Breman Holocaust Museum and shares the story of the Holocaust because “if we forget history we are doomed to repeat it.”

Despite the documentation of personal testimonies, photographs and other proof, there are many who deny it occurred.

“There are over 60 websites which deny the Holocaust ever happened,” he said.

And for those who can’t disprove the fact that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, they lie about it or demean it, he said.

“Sixty-five years after the Holocaust, evidence is still coming out about it,” he said. “It was not just the Jews, but other minorities.”

As a witness to the Holocaust, Kessler gave his testimony and charged those in the audience with a duty, “To hear a witness is to be a witness,” he said.