Our local TV station had a report on a real-life Abe, born in a train on the way to a death camp. Only he's not an orphan (his mother survived), and I don't think he has an immortal adopted father. No mention of a tatoo either.
If you google Channel 3000 and do a search on Mark Olsky, you can see the video. I can't find a way to do a link. Here's the written story:
{{MADISON, Wis. --It was an answer that would determine the fate of two lives. Rachel Friedman stood before Dr. Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Friedman had been sent to Auschwitz from her home in Lod, Poland. Mengele asked her a question that would decide if she lived or died.
“He came up to my mother and asked her if she’s pregnant because pregnant women were just sent off to the gas chamber immediately,” said Mark Olsky, Friedman’s son. “But she knew by then why they were asking the question and she said no.”
Rachel Friendman was pregnant, but only by a few weeks. Her husband, Monik Friedman, was shot and killed by a German soldier before boarding the train to Auschwitz.
After Mengele was satisfied Rachel was not pregnant, she and three of her sisters were sent to a labor camp to make parts for Germany’s air force.
With her sisters' help, Rachel was able to hide her pregnancy from the Nazis for months. The sisters gave Rachel some of their rations of food to keep her and the child healthy.
Eight months they were sent to a concentration camp, the Nazis decided to close the factory where they were working. Germany was losing World War II and the air plane parts factory was no longer needed. The Nazis loaded Rachel and the other women into a train boxcar and sent them to the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.
But on the way to meet death, they met life.
“I was born on the way to the death camp at Mauthausen,” Olsky said.
The train trip to Mauthausen took 17 days and, without a calendar, no one is certain of Olsky’s true birth date. But a German guard who filled out the birth certificate made the choice for them.
“Actually the date of April 20 was assigned by the German guard as a favor to my mother. April 20 was Hitler’s birthday. The German people were still celebrating his birthday as a great holiday,” Olsky said.
The 17-day trip may have saved the life of every prisoner on that train. By the time their journey came to an end, the war was over.
“When we arrived at Mauthausen on April 29, April 28 was when the gas chambers stopped working,” Olksy said.
Within a few days, on May 5, U.S. soldiers liberated the Mauthausen death camp.
Olsky went on to become a physician and moved to Madison in 1981. He has returned several times to visit Mauthausen and will do so again on the 70th anniversary of the camp’s liberation.
“It continues to be a sense of sadness. I wonder about the people that didn’t make it and what it would have been like to know them,” Olsky said.
The story of his family's survival, and that of two other children born at Mauthausen, is the subject of a new book entitled, “Born Survivors,” written by Wendy Holden. The book is scheduled to be released on May 5, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen.}}