Dr. Mark Olsky is a Holocaust survivor, retired emergency medicine physician, and public speaker whose extraordinary life began under some of the most unimaginable circumstances in human history.
Mark was born on April 20, 1945, inside a crowded railroad car transporting Jewish prisoners to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, just weeks before the end of World War II. His mother, Rachel, had miraculously managed to conceal her pregnancy while imprisoned at Auschwitz and later at the Freiberg forced-labor camp. Despite starvation, brutal conditions, and constant threats of death, she gave birth to Mark during the journey to Mauthausen. He weighed approximately three pounds at birth, and both mother and child survived until American soldiers liberated the camp in May 1945.
After the war, Mark and his mother began rebuilding their lives. He grew up in Germany, Israel, and eventually the United States, where his family settled in the Chicago area. Inspired to help others, he pursued a career in medicine and became an emergency room physician in Wisconsin, dedicating his professional life to saving lives.
Mark's remarkable survival story is featured in the internationally recognized book Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope by author Wendy Holden. The book tells the intertwined stories of three Jewish mothers who concealed their pregnancies from the Nazis and the three babies who survived the Holocaust. Mark and his fellow survivors, Eva Clarke and Hana Berger-Moran, eventually connected decades after the war.
In February 2026, Mark and the other two survivors were featured on CBS's 60 Minutes, sharing their extraordinary stories with a national audience.
Today, Dr. Olsky continues to speak about the Holocaust, the resilience of the human spirit, and the importance of confronting prejudice and hatred. One of the most powerful lessons he shares comes from his mother, who taught him that allowing hatred and revenge to consume his life would mean surrendering something the Nazis had never been able to take: his humanity.
His life is a remarkable reminder of the importance of compassion, perseverance, historical remembrance, and standing up against hatred and injustice.
