David Adelman serves on USC Shoah Foundation’s Board of Councilors. David is the CEO of Campus Apartments LLC, a Philadelphia company that develops and operates on- and off-campus student housing. He is also the co-founder and vice chairman of FS Investments, a nationwide distributor of alternative investment products, and vice chairman of FS Investment Corporation, a publicly registered business development company focused on investing in the debt securities of private U.S. companies.

It’s a story my grandfather never told me, something that I only heard and understood later, years after my mother recounted it. In 1943, after his first wife and children were killed, my grandfather, Sam Wasserman, participated in one of the only successful mass escapes from a Nazi extermination camp. He and hundreds of other prisoners, overwhelmed and killed several guards and escaped the Sobibor death camp in Poland. My grandfather eluded capture, joined a band of partisans fighting the Nazis, and shortly after surviving the war, met the woman who would become my grandmother.