Ivan Berend was almost 14 years old when uniformed Fascists arrived at his apartment, forcing him to work in the countryside for the German Nazis.

Berend grew up in Hungary, which allied itself with Nazi Germany during World War II in 1941.

A Hungarian Jew, Berend would witness a war that led to the deaths of 32 family members, including his only brother. He was eventually placed in the infamous German concentration camp, Dachau, which marked the 65th anniversary of its closure this year.

Recently, Berend, a professor and director of the Center for European and Eurasian Studies, reflected on his journey from Holocaust survivor to European scholar in his 28th book, “History in My Life.”

After he was deported to the countryside, Berend was forced to carry heavy blankets and uniforms from German trains to the higher floors of a warehouse. But when Russians threatened to overtake and then liberate the encampment, Berend was transferred from the countryside to a number of different prisons.

He described his experience in prison as coming under “totally inhuman circumstances,” where starvation was common and hundreds of prisoners were crammed in an area with no possibility to clean themselves. It was not long until he and the other prisoners were moved again in 1944, this time to the Dachau concentration camp.

At Dachau, Berend said prisoners were referred to by numbers, not names.

While typhoid fever rendered him unable to see or hear at the beginning of his imprisonment, Berend, like all prisoners, still had to carry dead bodies, as others died every day of disease and starvation.

Despite the hardship, Berend said his imprisonment was also a “great human experience” because of the different people he met, from German and Hungarian Communists to French and Italian soldiers, providing him with one of his first experiences with people outside of Hungary.

He would exchange jokes with the other prisoners, who would take care of him while he was sick and take him out to the daily roll call. A Russian prisoner taught him to speak Russian, while an Austrian Communist shared remnants of his food with Berend.

Berend said the instinct to survive was important because the possibility of death at such a young age was never an option that crossed his mind.

Berend also reflected on his liberation by Allied soldiers. In 1945, SS soldiers, the military force of the Nazi Third Reich, took Berend and other prisoners to the German Alps with the intent to kill them with their machine guns. But without any apparent reason, the soldiers disappeared after it became dark. Berend later learned that the Americans were nearby, resulting in the German retreat.

Berend and the other prisoners later came across a village of Yugoslav prisoners, who gave them bread, milk and uniforms. Berend hid in a barn until liberated by an American soldier one morning.

According to Berend, he was 65 pounds when he was liberated, a heap of skin and bones on the verge of death.

After the war, Berend went back to high school and worked to become a historian. He started as a high school teacher, then became a professor of economics, eventually rising to the position of chancellor at Hungary’s Corvinus University. He later served as the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and chaired a committee for economic transformation and privatization in 1988.

In the summer of 1989, Berend received a message from UCLA offering him a position as a central and eastern European historian. He initially refused the offer, believing it was too late in his career to switch and because he felt an interesting period in Hungarian politics was occurring, as the regime became more capitalistic and privatized.

At the same time though, he was being sued by a leading opposition party in Hungary for accusing the party of anti-Semitism and racism in an interview with the New Yorker. The party lost the libel case, but the experience was overbearing, leading him to accept the position at UCLA.

At the university, he is seen as an educator who does more than his share, said Edward Alpers, a professor in the department of history.

“(Berend is) a most distinguished scholar, arguably the leading East Europe historian,” he said.

David N. Myers, the incoming chair of the department of history, said Berend is an exceptionally dedicated teacher with a remarkable life experience.

“He’s a unique mix of generosity and rigor,” Myers said, noting that Berend demands the best from his students and colleagues but is also generous.

According to Berend, although his experiences during World War II were horrible, in the long run, it enriched him with a better understanding of human behavior and helped him to develop an optimistic view that allows him to cope with hard situations.

The experience also served as an inspiration for Berend.

“I experienced history and wanted to be a historian to understand it better,” he said.