Reunion of lifetime

76 years after the Holocaust separated friends, they meet

LOS ANGELES — When Alice Gerstel bid an emotional farewell to her family’s closest friends in October 1941, she was hopeful she’d see “Little Simon” Gronowski again. And she did 76 years later and half a world away from where they were separated in Brussels.

Gerstel and her Jewish family had hidden in the Gronowskis’ home for nearly two weeks before her father sent word from France that he had reached a deal with a smuggler who would get her, her siblings and their mother safely out of Nazi-occupied Belgium.

The Gronowskis, also Jewish, decided to stay. They hid for 18 months until the Nazis came knocking at the family’s door and put Simon, his sister and mother on a death train to Auschwitz.

“I thought the entire family was murdered. I had no idea,” Gerstel (now Gerstel Weit) said on Wednesday, the day after their tearful reunion. She and her friend clutched hands at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust as they recounted their story.

“You didn’t know that I jumped off the train?” asked Gronowski, now 86.

“No, no. I didn’t know anything,” his 89-year-old friend replied.

The two will return to the museum on Sunday to recount to visitors how the Holocaust ripped apart a pair of families that had become fast friends after a chance meeting at a Belgian beach resort in 1939. How it put the other family on a perilous journey through occupied France that reads like a scene from the film Casablanca.

And, finally, how those separate journeys culminated three-quarters of a century later in a joyful, tearstreaked reunion in Los Angeles just before Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Commemoration Day.

There was much hugging, kissing and crying on Wednesday as the two old friends held hands tightly while sitting outside on a museum patio to share memories from a long-ago past.

Gerstel Weit’s family immigrated to the United States, where she married, had two sons and eventually settled in Los Angeles.

She learned “Little Simon” was alive six months ago when her nephew searched her maiden name online looking for more family history. He came across Gronowski’s 2002 memoir, “The Child of the 20th Train”, in which her family is mentioned prominently.

AP Childhood Holocaust survivors exchange photographs at the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum memorial on Wednesday.