DRESDEN, GERMANY — The clock at Buchenwald was stuck at 3:15. The White House advance guy noticed, and put it on the list of things to fix.
The 23-year-old laughed at himself when he learned the clock's hands were deliberately frozen, marking the exact time the concentration camp was liberated in 1945.
During the week Josh Lipsky spent getting Buchenwald ready for his boss' visit to the camp Friday, the clock would come to mark something other than schedule, precision, his own readiness.
He would live a little in that moment trapped in time alongside the grandfather he never knew -- and would know himself better when he left.
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Lipsky grew up knowing that his grandfather and grandmother had met and fallen in love somewhere in the network of Nazi camps near the Polish border. He also knew that they were separated when his grandfather was sent to Buchenwald.
"I knew they had met in the camps," he said, "but I didn't know the circumstances."
When word spread around the White House that Obama would go to Buchenwald, Lipsky asked to go. Though he now works in the visitors' office, helping to arrange official functions, he spent the campaign on the exacting task of advance work and still sometimes volunteers for big projects.
It seemed only right to visit Buchenwald, where more than 50,000 people were killed during the Nazi regime, and to finally delve into the family story. Lipsky -- who graduated from Columbia University last year, then went out on the campaign trail -- figured he'd just prepare like he prepares for any advance project.
On the flight to Germany, he listened for the first time to the oral history that his grandmother, Helena Langer, had recorded for a Holocaust foundation before she died. He'd been nervous about hearing it, but now that he was going to the camp, he knew he had to listen.
In it, she tells her story, of a young woman who fell in love with the camp cook, the man she would later marry.
The cook, Samuel Smulowitz, was 26 when the Nazis took him from his home outside Krakow, Poland, and sent him to a camp near the border with Germany.
The young Helena was in another labor camp nearby. She was singing a song on the way to her barracks one day, and some SS guards were so angered by the sound that they attacked her with a German shepherd and beat her mercilessly.
