Dabbing at tear-filled eyes, 91-year-old Fred Goldstein still wonders why he was picked to be chauffeur and mechanic for a captain in the notorious Schutzstaffel, a feared Nazi paramilitary force better known as the SS, during the Holocaust.

Goldstein realizes the selection spared him from being sent to the gas chamber at the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where German dictator Adolf Hitler sent many of the approximately 6 million European Jews marked for extermination.

“I was summoned to appear one morning in 1944 at the SS office about 100 miles from the concentration camp I was at in Holland near the Rhine River,” Goldstein said. “I expected the worst. A man drove me to SS headquarters and said nothing. There, I met a tall man who was an SS captain. He took me into his office, looked at me and said, ‘From now on, you work for me.’ All I could do was nod my head and say, ‘Yes.’”

Goldstein, a resident of Scottsdale Shadows condominiums since his retirement in 1979, thinks the Nazis may have known of his skill with vehicles and, because he was 22 years old and strong, found him useful. He spent 7½ years in concentration camps in Germany and Holland before and during World War II. He was first imprisoned in 1938 in Germany and, after being released and fleeing illegally to the Netherlands a year later, wound up in a concentration camp there when the war broke out in 1939. He left when the war ended in 1945, also avoiding the serial number tattoo many prisoners had.

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