"At one point, a woman hid them in a haystack; at another, Mr. Orenstein secreted himself in an oil drum. The Nazis 'were actually hunting people' like animals..."

"[T]he Orensteins escaped a roundup of Jews by taking shelter in a neighboring house, where a hideaway had been fashioned for them between two walls. They were eventually forced to surrender to the Nazis when they ran out of food. Separated from their children, Mr. Orenstein’s parents were executed over a pit in the local cemetery. Along with his siblings, Mr. Orenstein was deported for forced labor. He survived five Nazi concentration camps. At the Budzyn camp located in Poland... he heard a camp official call for 'all Jewish scientists, engineers, inventors, chemists and mathematicians.' Drawing upon his ingenuity, he decided to take a chance. Although only one brother was a doctor, Mr. Orenstein attested that he and all his siblings met the qualifications for the select group, which was ostensibly tasked with aiding the German war effort. In fact, the prisoners detailed to the operation did little but operate adding machines, performing meaningless mathematical operations, and other useless tasks. 'It was a cover-up on both sides!... German professors created this project to keep themselves from being drafted into the army. If they told the Gestapo that we were faking, we would have been killed, but they would have been drafted into the German army. … So they decided to fake the whole thing. Lucky for us.'"

From "Henry Orenstein, Holocaust survivor who helped bring Transformers to U.S. toy shelves, dies at 98" (WaPo).