Reunited Nazi War Camp Survivors Trade Tears, Stories : Thousand Oaks: George Donnenberg and Walter Berger kept each other alive. Long-lost comrades embrace for first time as free men.

Nearly 50 years ago, suffering from typhoid fever on a forced march between Nazi concentration camps, George Donnenberg got help from a friend named Walter Berger.

“We were walking from one camp to another and Walter was holding me up under my arm. Otherwise they would have shot me,” Donnenberg said. “If you couldn’t walk, they shot you.”

Donnenberg and Berger locked arms again Friday for the first time since 1945, in an equally emotional moment. Surrounded by television cameras, the pair embraced during a long-awaited reunion at Los Angeles International Airport.

Overcome with emotion, Donnenberg could only manage a few words as he and Berger, both 71, wrapped their arms around each other, tears welling up in their eyes. “It’s very nice to see you,” he said.

The meeting came after Berger, who now lives in New York, searched for years for the friend he toiled alongside between 1942 and 1945 in work camps in Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

“He saved my life and I saved his,” Berger said Friday. “We worked together, we shared whatever little bit we were given or were able to get. Whether we found it in the street or dug it up from the ground, we shared it.”

They were separated in May, 1945, when the U.S. Army arrived to liberate them from the Gunskirchen, a camp in northern Austria.

Donnenberg accepted an offer to go to America and join the Army after his release, while Berger went home to Czechoslovakia.

In recent years, Berger had sought Donnenberg’s whereabouts through fellow camp survivors, and repeatedly scanned the faces at gatherings of Holocaust victims in hopes of finding his friend. About six months ago, he said, he met a man in Brooklyn, N.Y., who knew that Donnenberg was living in the Los Angeles area and was in the camera business.

Three months later, Donnenberg received a phone call in his Thousand Oaks photo shop.

“I went to the phone, and he says to me, ‘Do you recognize my voice?’ I said, ‘How can I recognize your voice?’ ” Donnenberg recounted. “He said, ‘Would you recognize my voice if I told you that 48 years ago I was red-haired and skinny?’ And I said, ‘Oh my God, I know who you are. You are Walter Berger.’ ”

The pair talked several times by phone in the ensuing months and exchanged photographs through the mail. But Friday was their first face-to-face meeting since they lost track of each other in the chaos of liberation.

Waiting in the terminal for Berger and his wife, Margie, seemed like another lifetime for Donnenberg, as the arriving planes stacked up to unload their passengers. Wearing a green, three-piece suit and a white sailor’s cap, he chomped nervously on a toothpick, fielding questions from reporters.

Asked how he felt after a sleepless night, Donnenberg’s eyes filled with tears. “Happy,” he said.

Donnenberg’s wife, Edith, was also moved by the moment. “It means so much to him. Look at him, about to cry.”

Donnenberg said it is difficult to explain the bond that grew between the two men during their horrendous ordeal.

“We slept together under one sleeping bag when we had it and if he needed a shirt that I had, he had it,” he said. “When we had one piece of potato, we shared it. We were like one person, believe me.”

Standing side-by-side after their emotional greeting, the men said they planned to spend the next few days catching up on their friendship and trying to piece together hazy memories of the dark time they spent together.

The pair hope to take a trip to Europe together, tracing the remnants of all the camps in which they were imprisoned.

“It’s wonderful,” Edith Donnenberg said as the men settled into airport chairs, taking each other in and smiling broadly. “I’m happy he is nice and the wife is also nice. They are really good people.”