Sixty-three years after Erich Cahn’s mother filed out of a freight car and into Hitler’s largest death camp, a single rose dropped from his hands onto the very same tracks and brought closure to one of his most painful memories.

Convoy 33 brought Erich’s parents, Julius and Johanna Plaut Cahn, to the Auschwitz death camp with 1,001 other Jews on September 16, 1942. Because Julius was strong, he was sent to a work camp. Johanna, sick from supporting herself and her two infants on only 800 calories per day the previous two years was not so strong. She was put into a separate line from her husband and sent directly to the “baths.”

Erich was only two years old when he was taken, with his parents and younger sister Suzanne, from their Mannheim home and trucked to Camp Gurs in 1940. For the next two years he and Suzanne lived with their mother in the women’s barracks. In late August, 1942 Johanna made the decision to entrust her children to the civilian nurses of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), with the hope they would not meet the same fate she faced just weeks later.

The next two years of Cahn’s life were spent alone in the basement of a French-Christian family’s home. His days were passed in quiet fear playing by himself, reading by himself, crying by himself and dreaming of his mother’s return by himself.

“I invented a wishing game,” said Cahn in his autobiography ‘Maybe Tomorrow.’ “I told myself that if I sat on the bed and looked at every picture in the book without jumping up to look for my visitor, the French woman would come back. Or better yet, the cellar door would open and my mother would magically appear before me.”

The family risked their lives to hide him, feed him and keep him warm. But they could not take the risk of allowing him upstairs, where the Germans might see him; they could not love him, hug him or take away his pain.

With liberation, thousands of orphaned Jews came out of hiding. Cahn was sent to an OSE orphanage and reconnected with Suzanne. When their father was found, they were sent to live with him in Leutesdorf, Germany.

Erich and Suzanne didn’t find a loving home, however. Years of hellish work and the deaths of his brother, sister and countless loved ones left Julius bitter, somber and incapable of nurturing his two young children. Instead of a father’s loving touch, they found only strict rules, hard work, high expectations and harsh punishment if those expectations weren’t met.

Erich and Suzanne were again sent somewhere new after just four years with their father, who was unable to leave his business to accompany them to America.

Cahn tells of the day they left in ‘Maybe Tomorrow’ saying, “Not one hug nor kiss of farewell shattered the four-year record of tactile neglect. ‘Goodbye and good luck in America. You will be happy there,’ Vater (father) said casually. He was as indifferent as if I were leaving for school for the day, not crossing an ocean to begin a new life.”

The pain of never being hugged and of never belonging to a family followed Cahn to the United States, however. For the next three years, he would spend his nights on a cot in his grandparents’ kitchen corner. In 1953, Cahn was sent to live in a foster home in Denver, but a real family life eluded him there too.

“I was choked by the need to try to fit in. Home was not a place of security, but an ordeal of botched connections,” Cahn says in ‘Maybe Tomorrow.’ “I had no one. I had learned from an early age that it was risky to depend on any other human being. My young life had been burdened with too many losses to seek safe harbor in any adult’s arms.”

It wasn’t until Cahn began life in the Jewish National Home for Asthmatic Children that he found a real home. Cahn found comfort in the multitude of children his age at the center, which allowed a few orphans to reside there. The home supported the children in every aspect of life, from food and clothing, to kindness and emotional stability. He found friendship, love and the closest relationship he’d ever had to a father in the home’s director, Mr. G.

Cahn stayed connected with the home throughout his college years at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he became a cross-country runner. He worked as a counselor at the home during his college summers and shared the triumphs and tribulations of his college career with Mr. G. and the other counselors.

In the decades that followed his graduation, Cahn became a successful businessman and raised a family of his own. It was here that the effects of his upbringing began to affect his life noticeably. Cahn had to work hard at developing social skills normally learned in childhood and recalls dreading the small talk of the business world.

Parenting was another domain at which his past left lasting impressions on his actions. As a father, he stopped at nothing to show them the love he was deprived of and was hesitant to punish his children. ‘Maybe Tomorrow’ tells of one “rare act of discipline,” where Cahn left his children a note saying, “I am very ANGRY and disappointed. Please clean up after yourselves!!!!!”

At the time, he was unable to recognize that such behavior was due to his past and it wasn’t until the first ever Hidden Child Conference in New York in 1991 that he faced his past. The conference introduced some 1,600 displaced Jewish orphans to one another decades after their horrible childhood. Cahn met people from his home town of Mannheim and he met others that were smuggled out of Camp Gurs by the OSE like him. He even met one woman that had been at the same orphanage in France and they shared identical group photos, which included the two of them as children.

For the first time, Cahn realized that he wasn’t alone in the world. He realized that his horrible childhood experiences, his desire to be loved and his craving for a family were shared by thousands of others in the world.