Izzy Arbeiter (with the flashlight) in the cellar of his childhood home in Plock. The building was abandoned and condemned, but on April 26, local authorities allowed him to dig up the cellar to try to find silver candlesticks and other religious items, which he and his brother had buried in 1940, before the Nazis deported his family from their home. Izzy's grandson, Matt Fritz (left), and friend, Jon D'Allessandro (far right), dug for over two hours but did not find the candlesticks. Izzy assumes someone dug up the valuables.

Izzy Arbeiter's eight-day trip to Poland and Germany began in Warsaw, where the few buildings that survived the destruction of World War II were bedecked with huge photographs of Jewish life in the city before the war. The display set the tone for Izzy's journey - many of the places he visited had memorials to the Holocaust.

On his 87th birthday, Izzy Arbeiter visited the memorial on the territory of the Treblinka death camp, where an estimated 900,000 Jews were killed between 1942 and 1943. Izzy's parents and youngest brother were killed here in 1942; he had come a final time to say a prayer for them.

On April 27, Izzy Arbeiter, 87, returned to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where he was a prisoner in 1944. When he arrived as a prisoner, others told him that the only way out was through the chimneys of the crematoria. An estimated 1.1 million of the 1.3 million people who came to the camp were killed, mostly in gas chambers.

While Izzy Arbeiter was imprisoned in the nearby Hailfingen-Tailfingen concentration camp, he performed slave labor at a quarry near Reusten, a small town near Stuttgart, Germany. The conditions at the camp were abysmal - the prisoners were barely fed and half of them died, mostly of starvation. But in Reusten, Izzy recalled a couple who fed him and his fellow prisoners as they were being marched to and from the quarry, and briefly met with their daughter during a visit there on April 30.