Friends separated since Holocaust reunited at LA airport
Published: June 8, 2005
Two friends who last saw each other 60 years ago as they left Auschwitz on a forced death march cried as they embraced during a rare reunion at Los Angeles International Airport.
Sigi Hart, of Calabasas, and Robert Austin, of Bradenton, Fla., spent two years at the Nazi camp in Poland, where they shared scraps of food and hoped they wouldn’t be among those selected for death during an inspection every two weeks.
The last time the two saw each other before Tuesday’s reunion was in January 1945 when they were separated while marching from Auschwitz to Germany as the Nazis fled the approaching Soviet army. Both were emaciated and wearing striped prison uniforms.
Hart, 79, moved to Israel and fought in two wars before moving to Los Angeles in 1957 and founding a garment factory. But he always wondered if his friend, who he knew as Hans Ausubel, had survived.
He called the American Red Cross more than a year ago and asked for help from their Holocaust Tracking Service, which has reunited some 1,300 Holocaust survivors. After a year of research, the Red Cross located Austin in Florida.
Austin, who moved to New York and became a furrier after the war, didn’t remember Hart - something he attributes to the psychological trauma of Auschwitz. Yet he jumped at the chance to meet Hart and his family and close a chapter of their shared history.
“I (had) suffered enough,” said Austin, who lost his father at Auschwitz. “I made a conscious decision to put it behind me and live my life. When I came to America, I was free.”
Hart, a native of Berlin, fled with his family to Belgium, then France and finally to Italy during the Holocaust. Austin, a native of Vienna, also fled to Florence.
They hid there with the help of Roman Catholic clergy until they were discovered by Nazis and sent in a cattle car to Auschwitz. They say they were among just 13 men selected for labor from the 1,500 people in their train car. The rest were killed almost immediately, they said.
“We were thrown into an inferno of madness, cruelty and suffering,” said Austin, 83, at a news conference at the Bob Hope Hollywood USO at the airport. “They squeezed us, they squeezed us, but they couldn’t squeeze the life out of us.”
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