Auschwitz tattoos reunite 'brothers' 65 years later

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(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-20 08:53

JERUSALEM: As terrified teenagers 65 years ago, Menachem Sholowicz and Anshel Sieradzki stood one ahead of the other in Auschwitz, having serial numbers tattooed on their arms. Sholowicz was B-14594; Sieradzki was B-14595.

The two Polish Jews had never met, they never spoke and they were quickly separated. Each survived the Nazi death camp, moved to Israel, married and became grandfathers. They didn't meet until a few weeks ago, having stumbled upon each other through the Internet. Late in life, the two men speak daily, suddenly partners who share their darkest traumas.

"We are blood brothers," said Sieradzki, 81. "The moment I meet someone who was there with me, who went through what I went though, who saw what I saw, who felt what I felt - at that moment we are brothers."

The twist of fate doesn't end there. Two brothers who were with them in the tattooist's line have made contact since hearing of their story. As Israel marks its annual Holocaust remembrance day starting tonight, commemorating the 6 million Jews murdered in World War II, the four new friends are arranging an emotional reunion.

They are among hundreds of thousands of survivors who poured in at the birth of the Jewish state. An estimated 250,000 are still alive in Israel, carrying the physical and emotional scars of that era.

The unlikely reconnection began when Sholowicz's daughter found a website that detailed Sieradzki's odyssey from Auschwitz to Israel. It struck her as eerily similar to her father's.

All the same elements were there - being separated from parents and siblings and never seeing them again, searching for scraps of bread to eat in the Polish ghettos, surviving the selection process of Dr Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz camp doctor who decided who would live and who would die.

Later, both moved to Israel, fought in its 1948 war of independence, and made careers in its military industry. Still, the two men never met and the name Sieradzki on the website didn't ring a bell. Then Sholowicz, 80, saw the man's number and he froze.

"I rolled up my sleeve and sure enough - I stood exactly ahead of him in line at Auschwitz," he said. The discovery "was a moment of great emotion, great excitement. We went through it all together. We are like two parallel lines that never met".

He called Sieradzki the next day. Sieradzki says it is astounding that both survived the Holocaust and lived this long.

In Auschwitz, "I used to think about getting through the moment, the hour, at most the day," he said. "I didn't think about the next day, because I didn't think I was going to live to see the next day."

In an even more unlikely development, Sieradzki recently discovered who stood behind him in line for tattoos - Shaul Zavadzki and his older brother Yaakov, serial numbers B-14596 and B-14597. They too survived Auschwitz and made it to Israel.

"I choked from shock when I saw this," said Yaakov Zavadzki, 82. He then talked to the two men on the phone and said he looks forward to seeing them soon in person.

When Sieradzki returned to Poland in the early 1990s, he founded an organization of the former residents of his hometown of Zdunska Wola. The organization's website is what first drew the attention of Sholowicz's daughter.

"I felt like I was closing a circle," Sieradzki said of visiting Poland."

Now that story includes a new chapter he shares with three others, bound together forever by the numbers inked deep into their arms. "Our fate was to be together either in life or in death," Sholowicz said. "Now we have life."