His mother, Rochme Gittel Schiffer, and his sister Miriam were deported, probably to Belzec extermination camp, where they were murdered.
Bernard survived the Nazi concentration camps of Płaszów, Julag, Mauthausen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Dachau.
From 1991 on Bernard began to spend his summers in Kraków dealing with the past through what he calls the "process of healing".
In 1992 Bernard gave close to an 8 hours recorded testimony by the Oral History Project of the United States Holocaust memorial Museum.
In 1986, in a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, Offen told the agency that he would be refusing to pay 25% of his taxes and would forward that money instead to an alternative fund because his experiences in the Nazi extermination camps had made him unwilling to be an accomplice in the nuclear arms race that "could end life for 5,000,000,000 people, five billion Jews.