Beacon of freedom speaks across the years

Over a career that’s seen this writer cross paths with sports giants, political giants, media giants and cultural giants, the most unforgettable of them all was a frail, soft-spoken man named Eric, though he was painfully self-effacing.

You’ve read about him here many times, because the sharing of the story he shared that long-ago day we met has been regarded as a sacred trust here ever since.

“You don’t know what it means to someone like me to tell my story to someone like you,” he said, “because now I know that when I’m gone there’ll be one more person who heard it from an eyewitness.”

The Nazis, on a mission “to cleanse Austria of its Jews,” knocked on the door of Eric’s home in Vienna one morning, telling him he had to go with them for “questioning.”

Soon he was shoved onto an overcrowded freight car, bound for the concentration camp at Dachau.

What he would see and experience there was the personification of evil.

But by the grace of God, he would end up here in America.

Holidays had enormous meaning to Eric, especially Pesach, or Passover, celebrating the Israelites’ exodus from Egyptian bondage under Pharaoh. “This freedom we celebrate tonight,” he told guests at a seder in his home, “never came cheap or easy, but for my generation the price will never be too high.

“Having been in Dachau and Buchenwald has taught me for life what freedom means.”

He wasn’t trying to preach; he just wanted to make sure no one forgot.

He’d have gotten emotional today, too, for the Fourth of July, America’s celebration of freedom, was also intensely personal to him.

Though he would achieve great success in years to come, such as developing Sharon Memorial Park, Eric, who died at 97 in 2004, gave away much of what he earned through Combined Jewish Philanthropies.

He always knew what mattered most. That’s why he’d softly weep whenever he’d recall the day he arrived here, sailing into New York Harbor aboard the President Harding, bound for Ellis Island, the timehonored path immigrants once took en route to setting their feet on American soil.

“It was so dramatic,” he recalled. Indeed, his eyes began to fill as he remembered the majesty of the moment.

“As we passed the Statue of Liberty, someone read aloud those wonderful words: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … .’ ”

How far we have drifted from those moorings.

It’s something to think about, isn’t it? Happy Fourth.