Ann Curry Shares a Holocaust Survivor's 'Riveting' Story That 'Wrecked' Her on' We'll Meet Again'

With 40 years of on-air reporting under her belt, Dateline and Today show alum Ann Curry admits that one episode of the second season of her series, We’ll Meet Again, had a considerable emotional impact on her.

The documentary PBS series returns Tuesday, and the second episode — airing Nov. 20 — tells two stories of men who survived the Holocaust looking for a friend they hadn’t seen since. One of those men in particular, Benjamin Lesser, has a story Curry, 61, could only describe as “really truly unbelievable.”

Born in Krakow, Poland, in 1928, Lesser and his family were ordered by Nazis to move into the ghetto in 1941. They fled, spending two years on the run and in hiding before being captured and sent to Auschwitz, where he saw most of his relatives for the very last time.

Lesser experienced four concentration camps, two death marches and was among the 17 people — out of more than 3,000 — to survive a three-week train ride to Dachau before the camp was liberated by the U.S. in April 1945. Then aged 16, he was declared a “displaced person” and sent to a makeshift hospital in Bavaria, where he met a friend who would become his “brother,” Moshe Opatovski. Days before Lesser and Opatovski were to go to Israel together, Lesser learned that his sister had survived and made a choice to join her. The friends never saw each other again.

In the moving episode, Curry and Lesser work to track down Opatovski, and the results are both heartbreaking and inspiring.

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Curry tells PEOPLE. “If you wrote a script for Hollywood, you couldn’t make this up. … It’s a riveting story that I’m just so glad that we can make sure people are seeing, that we’ve been able to document.”

“I was wrecked,” she says.

For the news vet, telling the stories of Holocaust survivors on her series was crucial “because they’re disappearing and their stories need not disappear,” she says.

The recent shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue gives Lesser’s story an added timeliness.

“My first thought when I heard that the oldest victim was 97 years old was that she is only seven years older than Benjamin Lesser,” Curry says. “I thought about what she had seen, what she had experienced, what she had felt about this persecution and what she had survived — and then to have this happen, again an act of persecution against a targeted community. It feels as though we have far more to go as a species to rising above this kind of ugliness.”

Curry explains that through her show and several of her other projects, she aims to “provide the truth” to people in order to fight misinformation being spread and manipulated.

“Hopefully, it will add to that body of intelligence that helps us to see more clearly,” she says. “We’ve lost some fundamental respect for each other’s fundamental dignity that just comes with just being human. I’m pleased that this documentary series on PBS and on Facebook is able to reach people and is a contributor to a greater understanding.”

Season 2 of We’ll Meet Again premieres Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on PBS. Lesser’s story will air Tuesday, Nov. 20.