Eight decades have passed since two friends – Jack Wasal and Sam Ron met each other for the last time. As teenagers, both men were imprisoned in the Pionki labour camp established by Nazi Germany on Polish soil.

“We were pushing coal to the oven to make heat to make power, and Jack said he worked at the same place!” Sam Ron told CBS. 

“Hard work, bad conditions, cold, hunger, hundreds of people died. It wasn’t uncommon to wake up in the morning and find the person next to you cold,” he recalled. 

Jack Wasal eventually managed to escape the German labour camp, while Sam Ron was transferred to another camp that was ultimately liberated. Both young men managed to immigrate to Ohio where they both lived for nearly half a century, unaware of each other’s existence. 

Neither of them knew the other had survived, until Jack Waksal attended a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s South Florida Dinner last weekend, and found his old camp partner to be the guest speaker. 

“He jumped off the seat and came running over to my seat and says you’re my brother, I was very emotional, I’m normally not a very emotional guy,” Sam Ron told NBC Miami.

The story of Jack Wasal and Sam Ron is as moving as it is à reminder of how the atrocities perpetrated during WWII took place not so long ago, after all. The fact that people alive today remember what was going on inside German camps in Central Europe is the best proof for that. 

Image: Red Banyan

Author: Sébastien Meuwissen