Dr. Jacob Eisenbach, a retired dentist and concentration camp survivor, will talk about his life at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 2, in the Community Center.

His appearance is sponsored by the Town of Fountain Hills and Chabad of Fountain Hills. To RSVP and purchase tickets, visit JewishFountainHills.com or call 480-776-4763.

Tickets are $18 online or $25 at the door.

He will discuss his life while in the grip of Hitler’s Third Reich, and how hatred, discrimination and intolerance led directly to the Holocaust. He is the sole survivor of an extended family of 100.

Eisenbach was born in Poland in 1923. He grew up in a household where his dream was to be a doctor, his brother, Sam, an author, and his sister a pharmacist.

That all changed when Hitler’s army invaded Poland in 1939. The Jewish ghetto in Eisenbach’s hometown of Lodz became a fenced prison camp. The family was torn apart. His mother died before the invasion, his father in a forced labor camp, his brother Henry at Auschwitz at age eleven. His sister was killed by machine gun fire in the city of Lwow, where Nazis killed over 100,000 Jews in three days.

Jacob and his brother Sam were captured and taken to a work camp/munition factory in Skarzysko, Poland. They were later moved to a second munitions factory, where Jacob met a young woman, Irene, who was to become his wife.

“I tell students we have every reason to be angry. We have every reason to give up on humanity. But we cannot give up on humanity,” says Eisenbach. Sam survived the war only to be murdered by an anti-Semite two years after the end of the war.

Jacob and Irene lived in Germany while he studied dentistry and began his career. They later immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Cedar Rapids, where they had three sons, and he set up practice.

In the early 1970s, Jacob and Irene moved to Anaheim Hills where he became the first dentist. She died in 2013; Jacob continued to practice dentistry until 2015 when he retired at the age of 92 in the same office where he started.

“If I face a stressful situation, I stop and think for a moment about my experience under the Nazis. It doesn’t begin to compare, I consider myself to be very lucky.”