In a Sign of Ultimate Respect and Humility a Holocaust Survivor Falls to His Knees in Front of The US Soldier who Liberated Him From a Concentration Camp

By the time it was liberated more than 35,000 people had been murdered there – in executions, in cruel medical experiments, starved, worked and beaten to death.

The first person he saw was Hungarian Jew Kaufman. He was hiding in the latrines with other prisoners, uncertain if the soldiers who arrived were liberators or a Nazi death squad sent to liquidate the camp.

‘We were confined to barracks by the guards. This meant most of us were marked for death,’ Mr Kaufman said.

‘Then I saw the white flag flying from the watchtower and I realised then that the torture was at an end. When the Americans smashed in the door, my heart did somersaults.‘

Gillespie helped the emaciated prisoner into the daylight and back into the land of the living. Both parted with tears in their eyes – both believed they would never see one another again.

Kaufman, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, made it to Israel where he became a soldier who fought in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War. 

He later emigrated to America where he married, fathered three daughters and became a self employed plumber.

Gillespie married, fathered eight children and built a career for himself as a successful salesman. 

Amazingly, neither knew that they lived within an hour’s drive of each other until a German documentary crew arranged their moving reunion on the sand at Hungtington Beach, California.

Accompanied by his youngest daughter Alexandra, 34, to the meeting, Joshua said: ‘I came out of hell into the light. For that, and to him, I am eternally grateful.’

Gillespie had fought with his comrades through Europe to reach the gates of the Dachau camp.

He said, ‘It was the most profound shock of my life. Its liberation changed my life forever.”

‘We could not understand it. I grew up in California where we had everything in abundance. 

‘We didn’t get how people could let other people starve. They murdered them or just let them die. Again and again the questions moved through my head. And at the same time I was just incredibly angry.’

When they were reunited, Gillespie asked Kaufman: ‘How did you survive? What kept you alive?’ 

An emotional and overwhelmed Kaufman replied: ‘Dying would have been easier. In Dachau we had to tote around 50 kilo cement sacks. The whole day long.

‘Whoever broke down was immediately shot. It turned me into an animal. And animals want to survive. I wanted to live.’ 

He described how, to this day, he still sleeps on a thin mattress close to a window so he can gaze out at green grass every day.

The meeting, and their stories, will be told in a special for the History Channel Deutschland to be screened on May 31. 

Kaufman had the last word on the beach when he said: ‘I have everything I wanted in life through him. That is the reason for my thankfulness.’

Both men are old, both realise they will probably never see one another again. 

But both said they were humbled by their meeting so many years after Nazism was crushed.

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