Fritz Ottenheimer is humble.

"My story is not that dramatic," he said. "I was not in a death camp."

But he is quite familiar with Holocaust horrors, and the stories he told last week were dramatic, humbling and haunting.

Mr. Ottenheimer, 83, is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. He lives in Forest Hills, but as a teenager was forced to flee his native Germany with his family.

He was the featured speaker Nov. 11 at the annual Kristallnacht Remembrance Service, sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University. Mr. Ottenheimer addressed a standing-room crowd in St. Joseph Chapel, which seats 400 to 500 on the Greensburg campus.

He has spoken often about his experiences, which include -- remarkably -- a return to Germany as a U.S. soldier before the end of the war. That was the subject of his 1991 book, "Escape and Return: Memories of Nazi Germany."

"I assume that if people invite me in, they want to hear my story," Mr. Ottenheimer said. "They're on my side and sympathize with the problems that we had."

Mr. Ottenheimer was born in Konstanz in southern Germany, near the Swiss border. On the night of Nov. 9, 1938, and early the next morning, Nazis destroyed synagogues and Jewish businesses and homes throughout Germany.

Mr. Ottenheimer, then 13, was awakened by an explosion at the synagogue in Konstanz, which had only about 500 Jewish citizens.

This was Kristallnacht, "the night of broken glass," so named because of the windows shattered at synagogues and Jewish-owned stores.

The afternoon of Nov. 10, Mr. Ottenheimer's father, Ludwig, was among 30,000 Jewish men who were sent to labor camps for six months. After his release in 1939, he took his family to New York, where they settled.

Mr. Ottenheimer completed high school in the United States and served in the Army.

"I got a chance to fight against my fatherland just before the war ended," he said.

More than a quarter-century earlier, Ludwig Ottenheimer had defended his country.

"My father was a German soldier in World War I and was wounded," Fritz Ottenheimer said. "He recovered in a German hospital and was awarded medals for bravery.

"My father had a haberdashery in town that he opened up after coming back from the army. My parents, Ludwig and Klara, were married in 1921. My older sister, Ilse, came to New York City a year before the rest of the family.

"We were good Germans."

Mr. Ottenheimer encountered other good people during those dark times.

"After Hitler took Austria in March 1938, the Austrians were worse than the Germans," Mr. Ottenheimer said. "Austrian Jewish families fled into Germany from Vienna and other cities, and many came to Konstanz hoping to escape to Switzerland.

"The border is just a 10-minute walk from where we lived. There was a little creek just 4 feet wide.

"The Nazis had a law that Jews could not stay at hotels, so an Austrian family stayed at our house and my father showed them the creek. After that, we had a steady stream of people coming through our house on the way to Switzerland.

"After awhile a police inspector, who was an old army buddy of my father, showed up and offered his help. He arranged for taxi cabs with police documentation to help Austrians across the border."

This police officer had two other friends -- whom survivors term "righteous persons."

"An escapee from Dachau checked into a hotel in Konstanz," Mr. Ottenheimer said. "They questioned him and he confessed to two of the three police inspectors who arrested him in front of the guests and drove him to the border. They told him to cross the creek.

"At the end of the war these three police were sent to the eastern front and were deprived of their pension and property. But some of the people they helped testified for them and they eventually got their pensions back."

Mr. Ottenheimer has a keen appreciation of the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education -- and for Catholic school education in general as it pertains to that subject.

"My best audiences have always been the Catholic parochial schools," he said. "The students have lots of good questions. And the schools are doing a very good job of teaching about the Holocaust. They consider it to be their problem and ask, 'Why do Christian people participate in this?' "