THE HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR

There have been times in my life and career that I have experienced remarkable and unlikely coincidences. Returning to America from a book tour in Poland was one of those times.

I have a loyal following in Poland, and, to my delight, my Polish publisher arranged to have me tour the country. (I had always wanted to eat a real pierogi.) I was kept busy with media and book signings and didn’t have the chance to visit some of the sites I had hoped to see. One of those sites was the Sobibor extermination camp. I had especially wanted to see Sobibor as I had made a character in one of my book series—The Walk—a survivor of the camp.

There weren’t many survivors. Sobibor was created with one despicable purpose—to kill Jewish people as efficiently as possible.

Sobibor was also one of the few camps where the prisoners had attempted an uprising, and some three hundred prisoners escaped, though, in the days following the revolt, most of them were hunted down and executed. Of the nearly 250,000 Jewish people interned at Sobibor, only fifty-eight are believed to have survived.

The character in my book was a Holocaust survivor named Leszek. After much research, I based him on one of those escapees from Sobibor, specifically on one of two brothers who had escaped and been hidden from the Germans by a sympathetic Polish farmer.

As I waited for my flight home in the Warsaw airport, I saw a dozen or so Jewish men and women dressed in Orthodox clothing. I noticed that their activity seemed to revolve around an older man with a thick gray beard. I guessed that the man was perhaps a rabbi or someone else of importance in the Jewish community.

After I boarded the flight, the elderly man was escorted onto the plane and, to my surprise, was seated next to me. The men helping him were speaking a language I didn’t know, so after they left, I smiled at the man, but we never spoke.

The flight from Warsaw to Miami took a little over eleven hours and the elderly man slept for most of the flight. He was sleeping when the pilot announced our approach into Miami International Airport and the flight attendants came down the aisles checking the passengers’ seat belts. When an attendant woke my companion, he seemed a little confused, as if unsure of what the attendant was asking him to do.

“I’ll help him,” I said. I reached over and buckled his seat belt for him. He nodded a thank you, then looked ahead. A moment later he turned back to me and said in perfect English, “Are you Polish?”

I was surprised to hear him speak English. “No. I’m American.”

“So am I. Why were you in Poland?”

“I’m an author,” I said. “I was on a book tour.”

“You’re an author,” he said. “How interesting. What kind of books do you write?”

“Novels,” I replied. “Inspirational novels.”

“You should write my story,” he said.

“Do you have a good story?”

“I don’t know if it’s good, but it would be interesting to read.”

“Why were you in Poland?” I asked.

“I came with a group from our synagogue,” he said. “I am a Holocaust survivor. Sixty-five years ago I was carried out of Auschwitz by a Russian soldier. I was just days away from dying from hunger. I had made myself a promise that before I died, I would walk out of the camp on my own feet.”

“Were you in Auschwitz the whole war?”

“No. I was moved through several camps.”

“Did you know of a concentration camp called Sobibor?”

His expression turned gray at the mention of the place. He slowly shook his head and said softly, “Sobibor. What a horrible place, Sobibor.”

“Did you ever go to Sobibor?”

His heavy brow fell. “No. No one left Sobibor.” He again shook his head, then said, “That’s not completely true. There was a revolt in Sobibor. There were a few who escaped. Very few.” He looked me in the eyes. “One of them was my cousin.”

“Your cousin escaped?”

“Yes. He and his brother escaped. His brother did not make it. My cousin was saved by a poor Polish farmer.”

Incredibly, the man I had based my character on was his cousin.

I told him what a remarkable coincidence meeting him was, and that I had based a character in one of my books on his relative. He flashed a big smile, then told me that after the war his cousin immigrated to America and became a successful Florida real estate developer. One of the first things he did with his wealth was go back to Poland to help the poor farmer who had risked his life to save his.

“That poor farmer now owns a very large farm,” my new friend said. “With tractors and trucks and all kinds of machinery.”

“I like stories like that,” I said. “And yours.”

“You should write my story,” he said again.

I thought for a moment, then answered honestly, “I’m not sure I could do it justice. I think you should write your story. I’d love to hear it from your perspective. I think a lot of people would.”

He smiled at me and said, “Maybe I will someday. Maybe I will.”

It’s been years since that meeting. I’ve lost track of him. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. But I have no doubt that I was meant to meet him. The odds that we were in Poland at the same time are astronomical. Even more that we were on the same flight and sitting next to each other.

I don’t believe it was a coincidence. I believe it was a God thing. While for some the mathematics of the universe suggests the existence of a Supreme Being, to me, it is that which defies math’s probabilities that gives the most evidence of God—the improbability of two objects colliding in an infinite void. In this, God, not the devil, is in the details.