CALISTOGA – Northern California Holocaust survivor Nick Hope turned 100 on Sunday.
Hope, surrounded by friends and family, held a birthday party in her hometown of Calistoga to celebrate living a century.
“I don’t feel like I’m 100,” Hope said Sunday.
CBS13 first shared Hope’s full story in a three-part series that aired in May 2024, titled “What Hope can do.”
Although his birthday was filled with smiles, there were many days in Hope’s life that were darker. On some, he didn’t even know if he would make it the next morning, let alone another decade.
“How did I get through this horrible, horrible hell to 100 years?” Hope said.
Only one child survived the Hope Holodomor, a forced famine on the Ukrainian people that claimed millions of lives.
As a teenager, Hope was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany for more than two years.
“No more man. Not a name. Zero. When you step in, you’re a dead man,” Hope said.
Hope during each trial kept his grandfather’s words in his heart: “He always said, ‘Patience. Patient,'” Hope said.
He survived the Holocaust after American forces liberated Dachau. Then he really lived by.
“For him to do what he did, it’s beyond himself. Very difficult,” said George, Nick Hope’s son. “And for him, he doesn’t hang up. That’s the beautiful thing, he wants to keep going forward. I think for him to be 100, his famous saying is ‘Just keep going.’
George is one of Hope’s three children.
After the end of World War II, Hope found a new life by marrying his wife Nadia, also a Holocaust survivor.
They lived for a time in Germany after the war and eventually settled in Calistoga.
Hope worked until the age of 97 and retired a famous Napa Valley builder.
If there’s one thing that defines his life more than hope, it’s faith and forgiveness.
“It helps me live my whole life, until I’m 100 years old. God says, ‘Forgive and be forgiven,'” Hope said.
The family is raise money in an online fundraiser with the goal of sending Hope back to Dachau for the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation in April 2025.