Thanksgiving Reunion Brings Holocaust Survivor Together With Her Rescuers After 66 Years

[Kadie]

Thanksgiving Reunion Brings Holocaust Survivor Together With Her Rescuers After 66 Years
First Posted: 11/23/11 05:00 PM ET Updated: 11/23/11 05:13 PM ET




NEW YORK -- It's been 66 years since Mary Katz Erlich last saw the boy and girl who saved her life.

Egle and Aurimas Ruzgys were teens in Lithuania when Nazis began to hunt Jews to send to concentration camps. As Catholics, they were safe, except for a big secret they kept for three years: their Jewish friends, Erlich and her parents, were hidden inside their home in a small space accessed through a hole in a kitchen cabinet.

The three friends last saw each other in 1945, after the liberation of Nazi-ruled lands at the end of World War II. Erlich's parents soon moved to the United States as part of a wave of Holocaust survivors who immigrated. But Erlich, who is now 83 and lives in suburban Boston, quickly lost touch with her friends. It did not help that what she gained in fluent English, she lost in her native language, the only language that those who saved her spoke.

Each went on to have lives full of happiness and families of their own, but each also felt a longing for the past friendships that had gone missing -- until now.

more...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/23/thanksgiving-reunion-holocaust-survivors_n_1110316.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

[DesertFlower]

1. what a wonderful reunion.

[Fire Walk With Me]

2. K&R

[YellowRubberDuckie]

3. That is amazing.

What an amazing charity.
Duckie

[ellisonz]

4. Wonderful

My Grandmother was hidden by Polish Catholics for some period in 1940 until the Nazis captured her in a sweep. We've never been able to get full stories out of her or my grandfather because the memories are just too painful.