How is what possible? The Germans put all Jews on, even pregnant ones. His mother gave birth in the cattle car.
He was lucky. They survived. Most of his relatives did not.
He is an observant Jew. Follows all dietary laws, goes to Temple, observes all religious holidays, etc. He does this as a strong assertion that he is a Jew, he will not let anyone take that away from him. Ever.
Because they obviously did not. Camps varied in cruelty quite a bit. It's worth learning about how a modern society like Weimar Germany could have been influenced to take the course of action that it did. Similar things continue to happen all over the world, and education is important in combating it.
I do not know all of the details, and this was someone I worked with over a decade ago. I've never had any particular reason to doubt his honesty, but I never tried hard to verify that particular claim either.
However I know that he was a Hungarian Jew. His family therefore would not have faced deportation to concentration camps until after the German invasion in 1944. According to http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005142 there were some children successfully hidden by prisoners in camps.
After some time with Google, I wonder whether he could have been the one born on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kastner%27s_train. (Which was indeed a cattle car on its way to a concentration camp - but the people in the car survived.) I do not know and, due to the fact that I have not seen him since I moved to the West Coast a decade ago, am not in a position to ask.
The concentration camps weren't uniform, and even within the camps, some people were able to survive for a while and transfer. The system also varied a lot through time.
He was lucky. They survived. Most of his relatives did not.
He is an observant Jew. Follows all dietary laws, goes to Temple, observes all religious holidays, etc. He does this as a strong assertion that he is a Jew, he will not let anyone take that away from him. Ever.
He just doesn't happen to believe in God.