For 60 years it percolated in Sam Goetz's mind, rising to the level of obsession -- this need to find the American soldier who had loomed so large in the most critical moment of Goetz's life.
On May 6, 1945, Goetz, then 16, was among 18,000 prisoners liberated from the Nazi concentration camp at Ebensee, Austria, by the U.S. Army's 3rd Cavalry. The squadron commander, a tall, young sergeant, climbed down from his tank and pronounced them free.
We "kissed his hands and touched his uniform, as if touching a saint," Goetz would recall years later in his memoir, "I Never Saw My Face."
"Each of us wanted to make sure the man was real ... that this was neither an illusion or a dream ... "
Goetz spent years combing through war archives in Washington, D.C., without ever learning the soldier's identity. "I was haunted by it," says Goetz, now an optometrist in West L.A. "Who was that man in the first tank? What is his name? Is he alive today?"
On Saturday, Bob Persinger -- now a bespectacled, gray-haired veteran -- strode through the lobby of a Century City hotel and reached out to shake Goetz's hand. The Holocaust survivor stared back, measured reality against his memories, then opened his arms for an embrace.
And the soldier who had seemed so tall 60 years ago stood cheek to cheek with the man he had saved.
The Final Chapter
The Holocaust is not the kind of experience you put behind you. For most survivors, there's no making peace with memories from concentration camps where millions were humiliated, tortured and forced to witness unspeakable brutality.
How do you write the final chapter of the story, now that both generations -- victims and liberators -- are passing?
About 120,000 Holocaust survivors live in the United States -- about 10,000 of them in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Los Angeles is home to one of the largest and most active survivors groups in the world, The 1939 Club, which takes its name from the year Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. Goetz served as the club's president in 1965-66.
Some survivors emerged warped by anger and bitterness. Others spent years locked in silence and shame. Most, like Goetz, healed through hard work -- avenging, through their eventual success, the evil done to them.
"For years, many didn't even talk about it with their children," Goetz said. "They didn't want to impart guilt to the kids. And the kids wanted to know, but didn't know how to ask."
