A WWII veteran from Colorado has reunited with a man he freed from a concentration camp more than seven decades ago, and it’s the first time in 20 years that they’ve seen each other.
Sid Shafner, 94, had participated in the liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp in 1945. One of the prisoners there was Marcel Levy, now 90 years old.
“Sid tells the story that his convoy was stopped by a Jew named Marcel,” Peter Weintraub, president of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), who sponsored the trip, told ABC News. “Marcel tells him in Yiddish that ‘You have to leave your route and divert to help us,’ which he did.”
Shafner and Levy became good friends, and this is the first time they’ve seen each other in 20 years.
“Everything I have today, all of my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, is due to you, Sid,” Levy told Shafner.
They met at an Israeli military base, and the trip was funded by the Friends of the IDF as part of its “From Holocaust to Independence” delegation.
