Holocaust survivor, liberator meet for first time

WAPPINGERS FALLS >> Moshe Avital, a Holocaust survivor, and Barry Lewis, an Army veteran, have plenty of fallen friends to honor on Memorial Day.

Between them, they’ve seen thousands of people die, both soldiers and civilians.

But this year, the men can think of something besides painful memories of war. On Thursday, Avital, 84, and Lewis, 90, met face- to- face for the first time in the auditorium at Wappingers Junior High School.

The last time Avital and Lewis were near each other was on the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, nearly 70 years ago.

Lewis of Denver, Delaware County, was a staff sergeant with U. S. Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army when it liberated the camp on April 11, 1945.

Avital was a 16- year- old Jewish prisoner in the camp, close to death.

Thursday’s setting was much different.

There was no threat of systematic executions. No emaciated corpses stacked in piles. No barbed wire surrounding a death camp.

Avital of New Rochelle, Westchester County, spoke to students about his time in the concentration camps before being formally introduced to Lewis by Jeffrey Place, a social studies teacher.

Place set up the meeting after learning that Lewis had a relative in the junior high school. It was a “bashert,” or destined occurrence, Place said.

Even if they had met before, the two men wouldn’t have been able to recognize each other.

In 1945, Avital weighed 70 pounds after a two- year period of starvation and hard labor in six concentration camps. He also was an orphan. Avital’s mother and father, along with half of his 10 siblings, were killed during the Holocaust. His parents were sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the first camp the family went to.

“They separated men and women when we got there ( to Auschwitz), and that was the last time I saw my mother,” he said.

Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, was one of the first people Avital saw at the concentration camp.

Mengele decided who would work and who would die and became notorious for his medical experiments on prisoners and his ruthless selection process, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.