Herman Shine who was one of the few people to escape from Auschwitz – becoming a voice for Holocaust survivors – has died at the age of 95 in his California home.

His story of meeting a woman inside the Nazi’s deadliest killing centre who would later go on to save his life and become his lover during World War Two is one of tragedy and hope. Mr Shine, who was born in Berlin and named Mendel Scheingesicht, was taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a teenager before later being sent to one of three subcamps included in Auschwitz.

There he met Marianne Schlesinger, a woman who worked at the camp but was allowed to live at home because she was only half-Jewish. After an exhaustive escape effort that included getting through a fence and traveling over nine miles to hide in a barn, Mr Shine would later marry Ms Schlesinger and emigrate to the US in 1947.

Mr Shine went on to describe his account of working in concentration camps throughout the war to countless Jewish organisations and media publications, detailing the harrowing experiences shared by millions of victims.

“The SS walked around with whips, with sticks, with steel bars, you know; they would beat you for any reason,” he told the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project in 1990.

Mr Shine joined one of his friends during an escape attempt while the two worked together at a construction site near the concentration camp. A labor worker who helped them devise the plan picked them up in the middle of the night with civilian clothing and led them to a nearby hideout.

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Eventually, the two travelled to Ms Schlesinger’s home, and her family found them a safe hiding space with a rich German in a villa. They stayed there until the end of the war.

“I am alive thanks to not one but to a dozen miracles,” Mr Shine told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2009.

Less than 200 people managed to escape Auschwitz, of the nearly 1.3 million who were deported to the concentration camp. Mr Shine’s death was caused by complications of kidney failure, friend told the New York Times.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

Mr Shine outlived many Holocaust survivors, as well as most of the people who helped him escape from Auschwitz. He later celebrated Jozéf Wrona, the man who helped he and his friend devise the escape plan, when he was named one of the Righteous Among Nations in 1991. That title is reserved for those who helped save Jewish people during the war.

“We want our story to be told to as many people as possible,” Mr Shine told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “Józef not only risked his life — our lives were worth nothing anyway — but he risked the lives of his entire family and his entire village.”