Too badly injured to work, she was on her way to Auschwitz -- and probably her death -- when her train broke down. She ended up in the infirmary of Samuel's camp.
Being a cook was a good thing in the hierarchy of the camp, his grandmother's story goes on. He could move around the camp. He could bring food to the sick. He had access to the infirmary register, and a pen.
"He substituted the name of a dying woman with her name," Lipsky said. The older woman went to Auschwitz in his grandmother's place.
The two were parted when the cook was sent from the camp to Buchenwald, and they nearly lost each other.
After liberation in April 1945, Helena followed rumors about Samuel to several German and Polish cities, jumping from trolley to trolley with his picture.
At the back of a car in Munich, she finally found her cook. "I'm here. You don't need to look any further," he said, according to a family transcript of the grandmother's tape.
They married, immigrated to the United States, opened a kosher butcher shop in Louisville, Ky., and raised three children. One of them is Miriam Gabriela Lipsky, Josh's mother.
What had been lost in the story, though, were the details of Samuel Smulowitz's time at Buchenwald. He died in 1975, 30 years after the clock at Buchenwald stopped moving but a decade before his grandson was born.
By the time Lipsky got to the camp last week, its caretakers already knew of his connection from other young staffers already there. Within hours of his arrival, the information began to flow.
A guide found a letter from a prisoner, telling of a camp cook in the later years of Buchenwald who used to line his clothing with potatoes and sneak them to the hungriest. The detail about hiding food in the lining mirrored a fragment of information from his grandmother's tapes.
Later, someone from the camp's foundation came to him with his grandfather's check-in slip, on which the young cook had signed his name -- in a manner bearing a striking resemblance to the way Lipsky writes his own signature. Each extends the leg of the last letter to underline the rest of his name.
As he moved about the grounds, Lipsky passed sights that he knew his grandfather had seen -- the nearby woods, the barbed wire, the zoo just outside the fence where Buchenwald guards brought their children to see the animals in one set of cages and the humans in another.
