Originally published 2022-04-05.
Jack Waksal and Sam Ron, photographed after their reunion in South Florida (photo via Scoop Upworthy, credited to writer Chandni G).
Jack Waksal and Sam Ron were teenage prisoners in a Nazi forced labour camp at Pionki, in occupied Poland. They worked side by side for more than a year, became as close as brothers, and then lost each other when the war tore them apart. Each spent the following decades not knowing whether the other had lived. In March 2022, close to 80 years later, they found each other again by chance at a Holocaust remembrance dinner in South Florida.
Their story spread quickly because it seems almost too neat to be true. Yet it is well documented by local television interviews, and it says a lot about how many survivor stories remain unconnected, even today.
How the two men met at Pionki
Pionki is a small town in central Poland, east of Radom, built around a state gunpowder and explosives factory founded in 1923. After German forces occupied the area in 1939, the plant became part of the Nazi war economy, and Jewish residents were conscripted for slave labour, including dangerous work in the explosives plant. A ghetto was set up in late 1941; in 1942 most of the town's Jews were deported, many of them to be murdered at Treblinka, while a smaller group judged fit to work was kept in a labour camp.
Waksal and Ron were among those labourers. Ron later described feeding coal into ovens to produce heat and power, and he was surprised at the reunion to learn that Waksal had worked at the same post. In his own words to CBS Miami, life there meant "Hard work, bad conditions, cold, hunger, hundreds of people died." He has also spoken of going without food for long stretches and of the constant fear of being selected for transport to Auschwitz.
Two different ways out
The friends did not leave Pionki together. Waksal managed to escape into the nearby forest, a route a small number of prisoners attempted when guards were stretched or a transport was being assembled. Ron stayed in the camp system and was moved to another camp, which was later liberated by Allied forces. With no lists, no addresses and no way to ask, each simply assumed the worst about the other.
Decades in the same state, and then the same region
What makes the story striking is how close the two came without knowing it. Both men emigrated to the United States after the war. Both settled in Ohio, where they lived for roughly four decades. Both later retired to South Florida, where, by the time of their reunion, they lived only about 40 miles apart.
That kind of near miss was common for survivors. Families and friends scattered across displaced persons camps, Israel, the Americas and Australia. Names were changed or anglicised, and many survivors rarely spoke about the war in their new communities, so even people living in the same city could remain strangers to each other.
The reunion at the Holocaust Memorial Museum dinner
The meeting happened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's South Florida dinner, an annual event that brings together survivors, their families and supporters. Ron, who regularly speaks to audiences about his experiences, was one of the guest speakers. Waksal was in the audience, heard Ron's story, and realised who he was listening to.
According to Ron's interview with NBC Miami, Waksal leapt up, hurried over to his seat and greeted him with three words: "You're my brother." Ron, who described himself as someone not usually given to emotion, said the moment overwhelmed him. Both men said afterwards that they planned to stay in touch and make up for lost time.
Jack Waksal and Sam Ron spent over a year together at a forced labor camp during the Holocaust. After the war, they had no idea if the other had survived. https://t.co/S3WxOrHH51
— NBC Los Angeles (@NBCLA) March 25, 2022
NBC Los Angeles shared the story in the tweet above on 25 March 2022, noting that the two men had spent more than a year together at the camp and had no idea, after the war, whether the other had survived.
Why reunions like this still happen
It is natural to ask how two people could go nearly 80 years without finding each other. A few realities explain it:
- Records were incomplete or destroyed. Camp administrations often kept poor records of forced labourers, and the SS destroyed many files as the war ended.
- People changed names. Survivors frequently adopted new surnames or spellings when they emigrated, which makes searching by name unreliable.
- Many survivors stayed silent. For years, plenty of them avoided talking about the camps, even with their own children.
- Tracing tools came late. Large searchable databases and survivor registries only became widely accessible online in the 2000s.
Organisations still help families and survivors look for one another. The Arolsen Archives in Germany hold millions of documents on victims of Nazi persecution, the USHMM runs a Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem maintains the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names. Anyone researching a relative can start with those, and with local Jewish community archives.
Sam Ron's message to young people
Ron spends much of his time speaking to students. His message is simple and does not centre on anger. As he put it in the interviews that followed the reunion: "I try to teach them not to hate, and to have a lot of hope and believe in yourself." He links that outlook directly to his own survival: believing in himself, he says, is how he made it through.
Survivor testimony is becoming rarer every year, which is one reason stories like this matter. Each first-hand account adds names, places and details that statistics alone cannot hold, and each one makes denial harder.
The wider history behind one friendship
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945. Millions of other people were also persecuted and killed, among them Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, people with disabilities, political opponents and gay men.
Forced labour camps such as Pionki were a central part of that system. They exploited prisoners for the war effort while working, starving and exposing many of them to death. For those who survived, the end of the war rarely meant a clean ending: it meant searching for family, rebuilding from nothing, and often discovering that almost everyone they knew was gone.
Against that background, two old men embracing at a dinner table carries real weight. It is a reminder that every number in the history books was a person, and that some of the connections the Nazis tried to destroy can still, occasionally, be restored.
Sources: Scoop Upworthy (Chandni G), drawing on NBC Miami and CBS Miami interviews; NBC Los Angeles; Wikipedia: Pionki; USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia.
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