ABRAM SHNAPER was a bookbinder by trade, a man who hand-stitched stories together and made them whole.
He's bound ancient texts and modern classics, but there's one story he can't seem to bind tightly together: his own.
The pain, hate and carnage that filled the seven concentration camps where Shnaper was a prisoner during World War II are a memory now.
But the sad realization that humans were capable of such acts is a horror story that never dies.
Shnaper, now 90 and of Philadelphia, grew up in Vilno, Poland. An only child, he was raised by his mother after his father died when he was an infant.
He said he was introduced to hate at an early age by the bullies who beat him up as a boy. He didn't know hate could run stronger, deeper than that until the Germans came for him, his family and his neighbors.
"The Germans came into town and took all the Jews and put them in one part of the city," he said, with his thick, Polish accent. "They catch you on the streets like dogs."
All people of Jewish heritage became concentrated in one place, Shnaper said. "It became a ghetto."
Conditions in the ghetto were wretched, at best. Gentiles who tried to smuggle food into Jews risked death, Shnaper said, but for those living in the ghettos, death was a risk faced every day.
"They would take small children and tell them they were taking them for a day in the forest," Shnaper said. "They never told you they were going to kill you."
Shnaper remained with his mother in the ghetto for about two years before they were ripped apart when he was taken to the first of the concentration camps he would see during World War II.
He never saw his mother again.
"They put you on a truck like pigs in a slaughter," he said. "You never know where the truck is going. They put 30 to 50 people in there, many were swollen with hunger."
Shnaper uses a list to remind him of the names of all the camps where he was held prisoner. But he remembers, without hesitation, the first and the last - Vaivara and Klooga, both in Estonia.
"Sometimes they torture, sometimes you escape, sometimes they send you from one camp to another," he said.
The images from the camps mix together in his mind - the blood and death bleed in between each human den of horror. Shnaper can't share his stories in whole, only as images, bits and pieces from a past he had to suppress to survive.
But he does remember the way the days started.
"In the morning, every morning, 10 people fell dead," he said. "You weren't thinking. Actually, you were thinking one thing - is this really happening?"
He remembers walking eight kilometers in the "freezing cold," in wooden shoes to stand in line with 2,000 to 3,000 people waiting to take showers.
"The first time you go inside they make you think you're going to have a shower," Shnaper said. "Later, the shower turned out to be the killer."
When he realized that not even the pursuit of cleanliness was safe, Shnaper knew he would have to learn certain tricks to survive.
He learned how to speak German, so he could understand the guards. He learned not to question why he was ordered to carry a large stone back and forth 300 times. And the boy bookbinder learned to become whatever tradesman the Nazis needed.
"If a German said ‘I need a carpenter,' you became a carpenter," he said. "I'm a bookbinder. I had never even had a hammer in my hand before."
Shnaper's worst memories come from his final camp: Klooga Concentration Camp in Estonia where, on Sept. 19, 1944, about 2,500 prisoners were murdered as Soviet forces approached.
For hours, Shnaper watched as his fellow prisoners were forced to carry the lumber that would fuel their own death pyre. He watched as they were shot - some to death, some, only to the brink of it. He watched as they were piled atop one another. He watched as they were set afire.
"At Klooga, they shot them. Some was dead and some was not when they piled them with wood and poured gasoline," he said.
Faced with certain death or likely death, Shnaper chose the latter. He would be one of only 85 reported survivors, many of whom escaped by hiding either in the camp or in the surrounding woodlands.
While he was surrendering to be taken to the giant pyre of human bodies, Shnaper was able to escape out of sight of the Germans. He hid in the empty camp and eventually, the Nazis stopped looking for him. He was later rescued by the Soviets who liberated the area.
"I was almost a body," he said.
The morning after the Klooga massacre, Shnaper felt moved to write a poem about the atrocities he'd witnessed:
"Here in this woods our brothers gathered the logs, arranged them / The Nazis then forced them down upon the boards and machine-gunned them to death," he wrote. "They then poured gasoline on all the bodies and set them ablaze / The flames burned fiercely and devoured our brothers / Here one of them covered his eyes with his hat / Another with his hand / They did not wish to witness their own deaths."
After his liberation, Shnaper became a Zionist Boy Scout leader before moving to Philadelphia in 1949.
In 1952, he was a founding father of the Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Philadelphia, an organization he serves as president. The association had more than 1,000 members at it peak, but now has just under 300, Shnaper said.
Shnaper was also a key figure in bringing the Philadelphia Holocaust Memorial to 16th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1964.
"When I came to Philadelphia I felt I had to tell this story. I had to put up the sculpture. I had to organize survivors," he said. "This is the job of survivors - to tell the stories. We do this because we are free and millions are not."