Daniel Waldman's father came to America from hell.

There is no other way to describe it, he said, as he watched a videotaped interview of his father talking about his five-year struggle in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

His father, Gershon Waldman, 73, like many other Jews who survived the Holocaust and the families of victims, carries a lot of reminders-the watch he stole from an S.S. guard his son said he killed in an act of revenge though Waldman refuses to talk about it, the number 128,289 tattooed on his left forearm, the nightmares.

Yesterday was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Hillel Foundation began a 24-hour vigil last night at 6 p.m. at Galbreath Chapel. As part of the worldwide Holocaust memorial project, OU students and community members are reading the names of Holocaust victims.

Yesterday, Waldman, an Athens resident, watched the videotaped interview he made in 1995 with his father, who now lives in Florida. The interview was the first time Waldman's father told him the story.

Waldman's father was 14 years old in 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and the town where he lived.

"The first thing they did was to gather the city's Jews in the synagogue," Waldman's father said in the video. "Everyone thought they were going to pray. The Germans closed the door and burned them alive."

His father, mother and younger brother were hiding in their cellar when the Polish farm workers Waldman worked with turned him in to the Gestapo in 1940. The Gestapo took him to Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin where he worked digging graves in which Jews were thrown and burned alive. One time, the Nazis threw Waldman into a grave.

Waldman crawled out from the covered grave where, buried under other bodies, he avoided being burned and escaped. He would be captured and escape again and be captured once more before the British liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Waldman's mother and father were murdered at Auschwitz after his father's Polish friend and business partner turned them in. Waldman, who returned to his home to search for his family after escaping for the first time, watched as the Gestapo stood his father, mother and brother outside the home they had been hiding in. The police beat and killed his brother when he started to cry. Waldman ran as they fired shots after him.

The S.S. captured Waldman again as he searched for his family and loaded him into a train car for a 10-day trip to Auschwitz.

"There were 100 people in the car," he said on the video. "Ninety-nine percent of them were dead. We had nothing to eat. We ate the flesh of other people. At Auschwitz, there were burning pits," he said. "They were always burning."

"What were they burning?" his son asked on the video.

"People," Waldman said. "Women who wore diamond rings had their hands cut off. Children were buried alive and you could hear them screaming, crying. You could hear the S.S. laughing."

Waldman, who had been forced to work in a steel-casting factory, stole a pair of pliers from the factory which he used to cut through the camp's wires. He escaped for the second time with a few others and lived for three months in tunnels they dug in the forest near Krakow, eating whatever they could scavenge, including cats.

Caught for the third time, the Gestapo returned him to Auschwitz and after a 43-mile death march and forced labor in a coal mine, took him to Bergen-Belsen in 1945, just months before the British liberated the camp.

The British did little more than open the gates. With nowhere to go, Waldman, who then weighed 75 pounds, was still fighting to live. He marched with 15 others into Germany in search of American troops. Instead of finding them, they ran into Nazi police who were hiding in a field.

"The British told us we were not to harm the Germans," he said. "I took back the watches and gold they stole."

"What else did you do?" Waldman's son asked on the video.

"I can't tell you what I did," Waldman said. "I don't want to talk about that."

Waldman found an American Red Cross refugee camp and escaped to America. In the 1960s, the Communist Polish government sent him a letter threatening to kill him if he continued to try to reclaim the property his father's friend took over after he turned them in.

Today, a videotaped interview with Waldman can be seen at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Steven Spielberg also has contacted Waldman about including his story in a documentary.

As Jews remember victims of the Holocaust, Daniel Waldman thinks of his father, a man he said is difficult to get along with.

"He is very hot tempered," Waldman said. His father once threw a man from a train for making an anti-semitic comment. "He doesn't trust people. It is kind of tough sometimes. A lot of children of Holocaust survivors have trouble with relationships with their fathers or mothers."

Waldman attributes his father's shifting moods to his past.

"It's from his experience," he said. "You can't change that. I mean, how many times could he be dead? He doesn't know if he believes in God. How could there be a God?"