92-year-old Holocaust survivor dies when car hits him as he crosses the road, cops say

Decades after his family was murdered in the Holocaust, Alter Wiener fought to educate the next generation about the genocide.

Now, the man’s family is mourning after police say he was fatally hit by a car while crossing the street in Hillsboro, Oregon, according to KOIN6. It happened Tuesday around 5 p.m., police say, and he wasn’t in a crosswalk when the accident happened.

In the months before his death, Wiener made it his goal to advocate for increased awareness about the Holocaust and other genocides.

“We are losing our history,” the 92-year-old said in September as he testified in front of the Oregon Senate Committee on Education, according to the Lake Oswego Review.

That’s why he was pushing for a bill that would make lessons on the Holocaust mandatory throughout the state of Oregon, according to KATU. He also published the memoir “From a Name to a Number: A Holocaust Survivor’s Autobiography” in April 2007.

“Fanaticism, extremism, it might happen again. My point is, educate,” he told KATU when speaking about the bill. “Show the world what did the Holocaust accomplish? What did Hitler accomplish?”

The 50-year-old driver was let go without any charges and Wiener died in the hospital later that day, police say, according to OregonLive. Police say the unidentified driver cooperated with the investigation.

Ron Wyden, a U.S. senator from Oregon, lamented Wiener’s death in a tweet.

For many years after surviving the Holocaust, Wiener said he rarely spoke about the time he and his family spent in a concentration camp, according to a 2013 article from OregonLive. His first official presentation about the Holocaust, he said, was in 2000 when he spoke at Hillsboro’s Century High School. It was the same year that he moved to the town of Hillsboro, he told the newspaper.

“I never did it in New York because I was busy with my life, and I was trying to rebuild my life, to study, to work and to have a family,” he said. “In New York when I talked about it, most people had difficulty to comprehend. Even my own children had trouble to believe.”

And since then, he said, he shared his story hundreds of times at schools, libraries and churches, OregonLive reported.

He weighed just 80 pounds at age 18 when he was finally rescued from a forced labor camp, Wiener said, according to The Lake Oswego Review. Five years before he was freed, Wiener’s father was murdered by Germans, he told the newspaper.

None of his close family members survived the Holocaust, according to KVAL.

But despite the suffering he endured, Wiener espoused a message of hope and love in his final years.

“Never give up hope,” he said in a 2016 speech at Hillsboro Brookwood Library. “The Russian doctor who liberated me told me if I live two years it’s going to be a miracle. And here I am, at age 90.”

This story was originally published December 12, 2018 at 12:40 PM with the headline "92-year-old Holocaust survivor dies when car hits him as he crosses the road, cops say."