Mel Mermelstein, an Auschwitz survivor who won a formal apology, $90,000 and a judge’s affirmation that the Holocaust indisputably happened, died Jan. 4 at his home in Long Beach, CA. He was 95.

Mr. Mermelstein was 17 when his family was deported to Auschwitz. His parents and two sisters died in the gas chamber there several months later, and his brother was killed apparently trying to escape.

He published a memoir in 1979 titled By Bread Alone: The Story of A-4685, his prison number. That same year, the Institute for Historical Review, a newly formed group of Holocaust deniers, offered a  $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove categorically that Jews were mass-murdered by the Nazis. Mr. Mermelstein refused to let the world forget. He submitted a notarized account of watching Nazi guards herding his mother and sisters into as gas chamber. In his last conversation with his father, Mr. Mermelstein was told that one of them had to stay alive to tell.

In a pretrial determination, Judge Thomas T. Johnson declared: “This court does take judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. It is not reasonably subject to dispute…It is simply a fact.”

With his collection of artifacts, his book, the court judgment, and a 1991 TNT film, “Never Forget,” starring Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Mermelstein, he fulfilled his father’s hope that “one of us will live to tell.”