Two-hanky stories to warm the heart

According to much of the Muslim/Arab world, these stories never happened. But here are two stories of Holocaust survivors bound to make you reach for the tissues.

In the first, a Holocaust survivor celebrates his Bar Mitzvah — at the age of 76. But he has a wonderful story to tell.

Rosenblat celebrated with about a dozen friends and local congregants, eating cookies and dancing the Hora. But his journey from near death in a German concentration camp to celebrating his life in a Mineola temple is just one of Rosenblat’s amazing tales.

Perhaps his most astonishing is the story of how he met his wife, Roma. While in the concentration camp, the teenage Rosenblat met a girl on the outside who would throw him apples and bread over the barbed wire fence that separated them. The little girl gave him hope, he said, in a world that was filled with death. Seventeen years later, after being freed by the Russians and immigrating to New York, Rosenblat reluctantly agreed to go on a blind date. After a few minutes of talking, the girl, Roma, asked him where he was during the war. When he told her, she got quiet and then told the story of how she used to feed apples and bread to a teenage boy in a concentration camp. The two realized they had been reunited and Rosenblat proposed on the spot. Six months later they married.

In another story of atrocities that did not happen, a Holocaust survivor is reunited with one of his rescuers.

“The fact that Lou is here today, alive and well, celebrating his 80th birthday, is nothing short of a miracle,” Ehrenfreund said.

But the miracles didn’t stop there.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ehrenfreund said, “meet Bob Persinger, Lou’s liberator.”

A gasp rose from the crowd as the silver-haired Persinger, now 82, walked to the stage and fell into Dunst’s arms. “Thank you for saving our lives,” Dunst said between sobs. “God bless you!”

They had never met before yesterday, but their lives have been intertwined for more than 60 years. On May 6, 1945, lifelong bonds were forged between a Holocaust survivor and a tank commander – without either man’s knowledge.

“I never saw him,” Persinger said.

“I was delirious,” Dunst said. “I didn’t know what was happening.” That morning, in fact, Dunst was literally at death’s door. A 19-year-old Ukrainian Jew in a Nazi concentration camp in Austria, he had crawled onto a pile of corpses outside the crematorium to perish. But that afternoon, Staff Sgt. Persinger drove his tank “Lucky Lady” through the camp’s gates, liberating Dunst and the rest of Ebensee’s 18,000 prisoners.

The most important part of the story, though, is this:

There were tears again yesterday, and again mixed emotions. Joy, yes, but also the sense that this lifelong bond involves a lifelong responsibility.

“Be healthy,” Irving Dunst told Persinger, “and be able to tell this to other people. Because, from you, they are more able to believe it.”

Sad, but true: The world is more willing to believe the rescuers than the Holocaust survivors. In all things Jewish, anti-Semitism rears its ugly head.

Via Omri and Judith Apter Klinghoffer.