🇵🇱 早前到了波蘭Auschwitz納粹集中營,然後讀到這篇集中營猶太戀人72年後接近百歲重逢的真人真事。So touching。
//In August 2016, Mr. Wisnia took two of his grandchildren with him to the reunion with Ms. Tichauer. He was silent during most of the car ride from Levittown to Manhattan. He didn’t know what to expect. It had been 72 years since he’d last seen his former girlfriend. He’d heard she was in poor health but knew very little about her life. He suspected she’d helped to keep him alive and wanted to know if this was true.
When Mr. Wisnia and his grandchildren arrived at her apartment in the East 30s, they found Ms. Tichauer lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by shelves filled with books. She had been alone since her husband died in 1996, and they’d never had any children. Over the years, bed-bound, she’d gone increasingly blind and deaf. She had an aide looking after her, and the telephone had become her lifeline to the world.
At first, she didn’t recognize him. Then Mr. Wisnia leaned in close.
“Her eyes went wide, almost like life came back to her,” said Mr. Wisnia’s grandson Avi Wisnia, 37. “It took us all aback.”
Suddenly there was a flow of words between Mr. Wisnia and Ms. Tichauer, all in their adopted English tongue.
“She said to me in front of my grandchildren, she said, ‘Did you tell your wife what we did?’” Mr. Wisnia remembered, chuckling, shaking his head. “I said, ‘Zippi!’”
Mr. Wisnia talked about his children, his time in the American Army. Ms. Tichauer spoke about her humanitarian work after the war and her husband. She marveled at Mr. Wisnia’s perfect English. “My God,” she said. “I never thought that we would see each other again — and in New York.”
The reunion lasted about two hours. He finally had to ask: Did she have something to do with the fact that he’d managed to survive in Auschwitz all that time?
She held up her hand to display five fingers. Her voice was loud, her Slovakian accent deep. “I saved you five times from bad shipment,” she said.
“I knew she would do that,” said Mr. Wisnia to his grandchildren. “It’s absolutely amazing. Amazing.”
There was more. “I was waiting for you,” Ms. Tichauer said. Mr. Wisnia was astonished. After she escaped the death march, she had waited for him in Warsaw. She’d followed the plan. But he never came.
She had loved him, she told him quietly. He had loved her, too, he said.
Mr. Wisnia and Ms. Tichauer never saw each other again. She died last year at age 100. On their last afternoon together, before Mr. Wisnia left her apartment, she asked him to sing to her. He took her hand and sang her the Hungarian song she taught him in Auschwitz. He wanted to show her that he remembered the words.//
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