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Light Rain Holocaust survivor gets a chance to say 'thank you'
Serendipity brings Holocaust survivor and one of his liberators together
The second time that Maurice Vegh met a member of the 87th Infantry Division, it was at a September barbecue at a Bristal Assisted Living Community in North Woodmere, where Vegh ran into Harold “Hank” Rosen.
Bristal had invited the Jewish War Veterans of Oceanside Chwatsky Farber Post 717, of which Vegh is a member, to the barbecue. Rosen, who lives nearby, was invited by a friend and was there with his wife, Joyce.
With a tray of food in his hands, Vegh sat down at Rosen’s table and, being the sociable person he is, struck up a conversation with Rosen. Vegh learned that Rosen had fought in Europe in World War II. And Rosen learned about the first time Vegh had encountered someone from the 87th Infantry.
It was 66 years earlier, on April 11, 1945. That day, the 87th marched into the Buchenwald concentration camp, where Vegh, then 15, was a prisoner, and liberated it from Nazi control.
Rosen, who was not with his unit that day, arrived at Buchenwald a day later.
Life in Hell
Vegh grew up in the small town of Rachova, Czechoslovakia. In 1941, Czechoslovakia was invaded and occupied by Hungary. Vegh’s town became Raho, and he started attending a Hungarian school.
In 1943, when Vegh was 13, he, his parents and his 11-year-old sister were rounded up and taken to Auschwitz, the infamous concentration camp in Poland. Within four hours of their arrival, Vegh’s mother and sister were killed in the gas chambers because his mother would not give her up. He was separated from his father and never saw him again.
“Every day I woke up starving and I went to bed starving,” Vegh recounted. “We marched four miles to the coal mine, we worked 10 hours in the mine and then came back. Got another piece of black bread and coffee and went to bed hungry. In the morning we got another black coffee and a piece of black bread, and we marched to the coal mine again. Week after week, until we went on the death march.”
The death march came in 1945, after Vegh had spent nearly two years in Auschwitz. With the Allied forces moving in, Nazi soldiers rounded up the prisoners and began marching them more than 400 miles to the Buchenwald concentration camp, outside Weimar, Germany.
