The Holocaust Remembered: A Reunion and a Promise

For 42 years, Paula Lebovics carried the memory of the Soviet soldier who fed her a crust of black bread the day that the Russians liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. On Sunday, she thought she had found him again.

Lebovics was one of dozens of Auschwitz survivors who flocked to a Holocaust Day memorial service at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles to reunite with retired Soviet Lt. Gen. Vasiliy Yakovlevich Patrenko, the infantry commander who led Russian forces into the camp in January, 1945.

The survivors greeted Patrenko like a long-lost conquering hero, snapping photographs, clamoring for his autograph, showing him worn pictures of vanished relatives and friends and just reaching out to pat him and shake his hand.

Comforted by Soldier

Lebovics was there too, wondering if Patrenko was the soldier who fed and comforted her hours after the camp fell to the Russians. Lebovics, 53, was an 11-year-old girl then and near starvation.

When Lebovics pushed through the crowd around the general and got a better view of the old man in the bulky pin-striped suit, she realized he was not the one. Still, she was not disappointed.

“I had to tell him my story,” Lebovics said after talking briefly with the general. “I felt that someone had to acknowledge our thanks to this man. Even if he was not the same soldier, I am sure he has the same memories.”

In a speech to 500 death camp survivors and their families who gathered for the memorial service, Patrenko commended the Wiesenthal Center for its work in bringing Nazi war criminals to justice.

“Many of those butchers escaped retribution and have lived a life of luxury,” Patrenko said, warning that allowing war criminals to go unpunished “leads to a rebirth of fascism.”

Examination in Moscow

Before his speech, Patrenko told Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the center, that he would urge Soviet officials to allow a delegation from the center to go to Moscow and examine captured Nazi archives that might be used to prosecute war criminals living in the United States and other Western countries.

“I am not authorized to decide those questions, but I would support the idea of closer contacts between the center and my country,” Patrenko said through an interpreter.

Hier said that if the Soviet government allows Wiesenthal Center investigators, archivists and legal experts to examine Nazi war records, it would be a “major breakthrough.”

“These are German battalion records, personnel records, witness lists that we have not had access to in the past,” Hier said. “Up until now, we have not been able to get Soviet witnesses to come to the United States. But if we had the capability to go there and interview them, it could shed light on hundreds of cases.”

Hier said the center is most interested in the fate of 242 war criminals suspected of emigrating to the United States and other Western countries after World War II.