But it wasn't until the end of the week that he stood in a long-hidden room in what was certainly his grandfather's domain, the cellar below where the kitchen once stood.
"The guide who took me down there had never been there," Lipsky said. Very few had, the longtime employee said.
The door's hinges were rusted over. They had to take them off with a wrench.
The guides illuminated the cellar with mine shaft lights, and Lipsky saw walls with peeling paint. Rusted wagons sat among the crude pantries.
Lipsky saw a rusted old chute coming down from the kitchen, and moved beneath it.
"He would have stood there under the potato chute," he said. "Some SS guard, or maybe another prisoner, would have thrown down a bag of potatoes and he would have had to catch it.
"That's the moment when I knew I was standing in my grandfather's place."
He said Kaddish, a Jewish mourning prayer.
When he went back to preparing for the president's visit, he felt that his grandfather was with him.
He did the final walk-through of the path the president would follow.
On the morning of the visit, he greeted the busload of reporters and moved them to their positions near the gates of the camp.
When Obama took his place -- beneath the clock proclaiming the time to be 3:15 -- Lipsky knew the exact number of paces between Obama and the bank of cameras, where he also stood. He listened there, 21 steps from the president. He did not check his watch as the president spoke of a song written by Buchenwald prisoners with lyrics that pledge, "We will say yes to life."
"These individuals never could have known the world would one day speak of this place," Obama said. "They could not have known that some of them would live to have children and grandchildren who would grow up hearing their stories and would return here so many years later to find a museum and memorials and the clock tower set permanently to 3:15, the moment of liberation.
"They could not have known how the nation of Israel would rise out of the destruction of the Holocaust and the strong, enduring bonds between that great nation and my own.
"And they could not have known that one day an American president would visit this place and speak of them and that he would do so standing side by side with the German chancellor in a Germany that is now a vibrant democracy and a valued American ally.
"They could not have known these things," he said. "But still, surrounded by death, they willed themselves to hold fast to life."
After the speech, friends saw Obama pull Lipsky into a hug. Asked about it, Lipsky said he didn't want to disclose the details of the private moment.
He packed his bags and flew back to Washington on Saturday. He wanted to see his mother in suburban Maryland right away. He wanted to fill in the gaps of the story for her. He wanted her to know what it meant to him.
"He worked in the kitchen," he said before he left Germany for home. "I am his grandson. And I came here working for the president of the United States, and that's a powerful thing for me."
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cparsons@tribune.com
