Death Camp Survivor and Army Nurse Are Reunited

To: “U.S. Army Hospital, Passau, Germany. 16 May 1945

I thank the U.S. Army for saving my life. I have been three years in the concentration camp and was very ill. The 5th of May, as [angels sent] from heaven, U.S. soldiers came in the camp and 130 boys more dead than alive were saved. “

--Jack Pinto

Holocaust survivor Jack Pinto, who escaped the gas chamber only because he was needed to shave other prisoners sentenced to die, was reunited Sunday with the U.S. Army nurse he credits with restoring in him a will to live 50 years ago.

Amid tears and the strains of a Hebrew folk song, Pinto embraced Aldean Mason and addressed a crowd of 200 people attending the surprise reunion at the Warner Center Marriott. “I’m so proud to be with the nurse who brought me back to life,” he said.

The former nurse, now thin and frail, had never forgotten her patient either.

“I kept your note for 50 years,” she said of a letter he wrote thanking the U. S. Army for saving his life. “I never thought I would meet the author of that note again.”

The crowd at the hotel ballroom cheered the couple and then swept them onto the dance floor. Pinto, who had survived six death camps and was spared from the gas chamber by death camp doctor Joseph Mengele, walked around the room with eyes reddened by tears and joy.

He had no idea when he showed up for the eighth annual banquet of the Beit Hamidrash synagogue Sunday that synagogue officials had contacted Mason, whom Pinto once knew as Aldean Nelson, and flown her out for the reunion.

“She’s a beautiful lady,” he said after embracing her. “She was so wonderful. She wanted me to live, to tell the world.”

The story of their fellowship and its revival spans two continents, involves Hollywood super-director Steven Spielberg and provides a testament to the enduring quality of friendship forged in turmoil.

Pinto, his wife, Ella, and their two children were arrested July 27, 1942, and packed on trains. Somewhere in Poland, the cattle car was opened and he was dragged away from them. He remembers the train-car door slamming shut. “My children were crying, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ ”

The only reason the barber didn’t go to his death with his family was because he was needed to shave the heads and bodies of the men and women transported from across Nazi-occupied Europe to be killed.

He was once spared by Mengele, who separated Jack and 16 others who had blond hair and blue eyes from a group destined for the gas chambers. Only the remote chance he had Aryan blood had saved him. In fact, he didn’t. He is a Sephardic Jew who traces his ancestry to Portugal.

In the camps, he managed to steal food and live through the beatings that followed when he was caught scrounging a scrap of bread. He tried to escape once by jumping from a transport train into waist-deep snow. He was captured days later, and would not be free again until Allied soldiers found him and 129 others lying near death in the barracks of Dachau.

He was covered with lice. Well-meaning soldiers doused him with DDT, the improbable first step in his recovery.

Mason and Pinto met in a hospital set up in the Hotel Kress, near the Czech border, shortly after he was liberated. He weighed 62 pounds and was being fed intravenously because he was unable to eat.

To Pinto, the nurse from America was a vision, a woman for whom the only adjective he can find is “beautiful.” She helped revive his desire to survive.

“I didn’t want to live,” he said of the month he spent recovering. “She sat on my bed, many times, talking.”

Aldean Mason was in her 20s, attached to the Allied advance in the final days of World War II. As one of the few survivors who spoke English, he became a lifeline to her, and a witness to the terrors of concentration-camp life.

While he recovered from malnutrition and pneumonia at the hospital, they talked constantly. Aldean would sit on the edge of the bed in Ward B, Room 27, and just listen.

Over the years, Pinto has told his story to schoolchildren and reporters, to colleagues and to generals at the U. S. Air Force base in El Segundo, where he once ran the barber shop.

Then he told his story on film as part of an oral history project funded by Spielberg. The project was featured in USA Weekend, a Sunday supplement whose May 7 issue included a small photo of Jack as a young man.

The former nurse, who now lives in Grand Rapids, Mich., saw the picture. She tracked him to Woodland Hills through a Holocaust foundation, got his phone number and called. Over the phone, they reminisced and cried.

“It was a miracle” to talk to her again, he said.

Jack’s synagogue offered to fly her and her husband out to see Pinto. She told them she wasn’t feeling well and declined.

But Mason slept on it and changed her mind. The synagogue’s president, Alan Shapiro, invited her to the banquet Sunday to receive a humanitarian award. The Warner Center Marriott put the couple up for free.

Everyone kept the news from Jack Pinto.

At the reunion, neither could remember the restorative words she spoke to him, only the emotional bond they shared five decades ago.

Speaking to reporters after listening to the strains of a Hebrew folk song, Mason and Pinto put their arms around each other. Mason, glimmering in a gold and black sequined dress, held his hand, lightly stroking it, as she described her excitement at seeing him again. Pinto’s family gathered around her, thanking her for helping him.

Pinto, frail and balding as he approaches his 88th birthday, thought the phone call he received from Mason earlier this month was astonishing enough. The reunion left him almost speechless.

“We really had compassion for the victims,” she said. “We were just doing our duty.”