Two Concentration Camp Survivors Reconnect At Retirement Community

Two men that survived the same Nazi concentration camp reconnected recently at a retirement community they both reside it. Neither men know about the other living in the community until one recognized the other’s accent at a memoir writing class! Once the men got to talking about their war stories they released they both survived the same camp! Read their stories after the jump.

@Julie1205

Leopold Lowy, a spry 82-year-old native of Czechoslovakia who moved to Cedar Crest at the end of last year with his wife, was in a memoir-writing class two months ago when he noticed a familiar accent.

He asked Pavel Graf Loewner, a 3½-year resident of the retirement community in Pompton Plains, which languages he spoke.

Czech, English and Slovak, he was told.

Lowy asked Loewner, a fellow Czech Jew, where he was during “the war.” No qualifier was needed that he was talking about World War II.

“I went to concentration camp, and I finished in Buchenwald,” said Loewner, who was liberated by Americans in April 1945.

Suddenly, a continent away and more than 6½ decades later, two survivors of the same notorious Nazi concentration camp found themselves together at the same New Jersey retirement community.

“Of all the places to meet somebody that is from your own country, being in the same camp,” Lowy said. “It was a little mind-boggling.”

“Then he told me what his stories are, and I told him what my stories are,” Loewner said.

Their tale really begins in 1940s Nazi Germany.

LEO’S STORY

Two lines formed at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Being sent to the right meant you would be put to work.

Going to the left meant you would be taken to the gas chambers, killed and cremated.

Leopold Lowy didn’t know that when he arrived as a teenage orphan in 1944.

He also didn’t know babies would be used for target practice, something he would later learn.

Lowy recalls seeing Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who made the call on which prisoners would live and which would die.

“I’m a carpenter — I want to work,” he remembers saying in German to Mengele, who shoved the new prisoner over to the right side.

Other friends went to the left.

“We didn’t know that it was death,” Lowy said. “All we saw was chimneys and smoke coming up. Later on, we found out.”

Two, sometimes three times a day, there would be “selections.”

It was the second of four concentration camps Lowy would be sent to.

Lowy’s parents had died after they became ill and were refused admittance to the hospital because they were Jews.

He and the other children in his Jewish orphanage in Prague were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, also referred to as Terezin, in June 1942. He was 13.

There, Lowy said, he and the other boys worked on an underground magazine called Vedem (“In the Lead”), edited by boy genius Petr Ginz, who wrote five novels by age 14. Every Friday night, the boys would gather to present their poems or articles or drawings — Lowy wrote about carpentry — and Ginz would rewrite the papers and hide them in the wooden slats of his bunk bed for safekeeping.

A copy of Ginz’s detailed drawing of planet Earth as seen by the moon was brought along by an Israeli astronaut on the ill-fated Columbia space shuttle. Ginz was gassed at Auschwitz in 1944, but his story became well-known after the space shuttle broke apart in 2003; his diary was published in English four years later.

Of the 132 boys living in Room No. 1 at Terezin between 1942 and 1944, 13 survived to the end of the war, said Lowy, who was one of them.

He went from Auschwitz to the Niederorschel concentration camp to Buchenwald, where emaciated prisoners were worked to death. Lowy became prisoner No. 95727.

Another prisoner named Pavel Graf was at Buchenwald at the time. Lowy would meet him 66 years later — in America.

American troops arrived to liberate the prisoners of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.

“Five minutes to 3,” Lowy says, the time still etched in his memory.

Immediately after the liberation, the Red Cross wouldn’t feed the gaunt prisoners much food, he says, fearing some would gorge themselves and their stomachs would rupture.

But Lowy was hungry, so he and another man left camp and set off for nearby villages. Germans threw stones at them. Eventually, Lowy saw a U.S. Army soldier outside a fenced-in compound in Weimar and pointed to his mouth.

Because the soldier was of Polish descent, Lowy was able to communicate with him. The Americans fed Lowy, then gave him a ride for the seven or so miles back to Buchenwald.

After a few days, Lowy returned, determined to get out of Europe with the Americans. Again, the Americans gave him food and brought him back to camp.

The third time, the captain, Fred E. Way Jr., suggested Lowy stay with the American troops while they were in Weimar.

They made Lowy their “mascot.” They gave him food. He did their chores.

Way told supply sergeant Matthew Bush to get a duffel bag of clothes for Lowy. When the supply sergeant called in Lowy’s measurements, the person at the supply depot said they were children’s sizes.

“We got replacements,” Bush deadpanned. “And they’re all midgets.”

Lowy said he traveled with the Americans to Marseilles, France, after the war. Lowy had only half an address for his uncle, Hugo G. Herz, a dental technician in New York City, but Lt. Irving Wasserman — through his parents living in Monmouth County — was able to connect Lowy with his relative.

Lowy met his wife, Evelyn, in New York and they raised two sons. A civil engineer, he was a construction manager for Howard Johnson. He and Evelyn moved to Cedar Crest Village six months ago.

While he was still working for Howard Johnson, Lowy was on business in upstate New York. He stopped at Norwich, Conn., where one of the Americans who had taken him in was working behind the meat counter at a supermarket.

“Sgt. Spano, how are you?” Lowy said to the employee.

John Spano asked Lowy how he knew his name.

“Sergeant, I could never forget you. You fed me.”

“Leo?!”

With that, Spano reached into his pocket and pulled out a wallet.

Inside was a photo of him with Lowy in Marseilles.

PAUL’S STORY

Something told Pavel Graf not to run.

His mother wanted him to escape through the kitchen window of their apartment in Slovakia and gave him an arranged address where he could hide until the end of the war.

His father worried the 16-year-old boy would be shot and advised him not to flee, even though young Pavel already had it planned that he would run in a zigzag pattern if the Nazis opened fire.

It had been a turbulent five years for the family. Pavel’s father, Gustav Graf, was forced to retire and they had to leave their free apartment after Adolf Hitler came to Prague in 1939.

The family found a beautiful apartment overlooking the Danube in 1940, but were forced out at the end of 1941 because a Nazi liked it.

They then rented a house that had no toilet, but slept outside on a haystack to avoid the Nazis who were rounding up Jews at night.

Pavel’s sister was hidden in an orphanage.

Unexpectedly, a pair of Nazis approached in the middle of one autumn day in 1944. When Gustav Graf told them his wife was not Jewish, they said they had her records and struck him so hard, he fell to the ground.

The family was told to pack up their best food and clothes.

That’s when Pavel had to make a decision: Run or not run?

He and his father were put on a packed cattle car. After someone broke the small window above the door in the train car to try to escape, guards said they would kill every 10th person until someone confessed. An innocent person raised his hand and was removed.

The locked cattle cars had no toilets, so the people on board were told to defecate between cars when the train stopped. Later, during a march from the suburbs of north Berlin to the suburbs of West Berlin, a prisoner was beaten to death for not following orders quickly enough.

The old and the young were being separated by the guards, so Pavel grabbed his father’s hand. A guard struck the teenager on his right ear, causing vertigo attacks that would continue throughout his life.

The younger ones were taken by train to Buchenwald. Pavel would never again see his parents, who were presumed dead.

He was sent to Buchenwald, where he shook dead lice from the laundry. A tedious job, to be sure, but much better than the back-breaking work in the quarry.

After the Americans liberated Buchenwald in 1945, Pavel went to live in London, where he was called Paul.

He came to the United States in 1947 and was adopted by his uncle, a Syracuse University professor. He took on his last name, Loewner, and finished high school and went to Syracuse University.

One day in 1957 in New York City, Loewner went to visit a Czech woman he had heard was a great cook. He was greeted at the door by her daughter, Ruth — his future wife.

Loewner worked for 35 years for IBM, where he did computing research, and lived in Westchester County, N.Y.

Ruth Loewner died in August 2007, about a month after the Loewners moved to Cedar Crest Village.

A COMRADE NEARBY

It took Leo and Paul decades to start talking about the world they hoped to leave behind, but never could.

Loewner, now 83, resisted reunions with concentration camp survivors and didn’t feel comfortable writing about those days.

Lowy did not talk to his sons about the Holocaust. He simply gave them books and figured they could read them if they were interested. But when Holocaust deniers became more brazen, he started to talk.

“This should be remembered for all times, what human beings are capable of,” Lowy said. “People forget. People don’t remember the bad stuff. And there was a lot of bad stuff.’’

Lowy has seen books and plays about Terezin, and had the surreal experience of watching a young actor portray him on a stage outside Houston. The musical drama, which evolved from a book, was dedicated to Lowy and all the children of the Terezin.

Last year, in Seattle, he reunited with three fellow survivors from his room at Terezin.

Loewner went to the Holocaust museum for a celebration last year, meeting plenty of liberators and American soldiers.

One liberator identified him as being in Buchenwald, and the two spoke for a half-hour.

Now, thanks to a fortuitous memoir-writing class in a retirement community, Lowy and Loewner know they have someone nearby to talk with about their common experiences.

Though they are at opposite ends of the retirement community, they meet for dinner.

Life is slower these days for the two men, but they keep busy.

Loewner bowls for the Woodland Wonders. Lowy plays pingpong, goes to meetings and walks a lot.

It’s a new life, but Lowy can’t forget about the old one.

And now he has someone to share the memories.

“There’s a little binding — the same history,” Lowy said.

“I was very pleased that there was somebody from the same place, that we had some common ground,” Loewner said. “We just started our friendship, so we are trying to find out when we can meet. And we talk. We talk about our old times. He’s the only one that understands what happened there.”

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