One Precious Friendship, Then Two Kinds of Hell

Miriam Jung can’t bear to throw away food. When she eats an apple, she eats the core and the seeds too. She feels guilty whenever she picks through potatoes at the grocery, looking for the freshest ones. She once dodged bullets for a handful of potatoes.

To this day, her childhood friend Georgina Havlik can’t stomach almonds. Cakes, cookies, anything with almonds. Because they smell like cyanide, almonds make her imagine the Nazi gas chambers, the bitter smell of death.

Jung survived the concentration camps of World War II. She wears a scar on her left arm, a tattoo with the number A2076.

Havlik, a Protestant, was never in a camp, yet she too has a scar. Until recently, she kept it hidden deep inside her soul, a misplaced shame buried under the weight of a nearly 60-year-old memory.

Taken together, their stories paint a picture of the legacy of the Holocaust: the horror of those who survived, and the unresolved guilt that continues to shadow countless others.

Last week, Havlik flew across the nation to Orange County for a reunion with Jung, one that wouldn’t have happened if not for Havlik’s persistence. They embraced and cried, and the years that separated them melted away.

The two hadn’t seen each other since they were 12, on a day in September 1942 when they had said their last goodbyes.

Jung, who is 71 and lives in Mission Viejo, barely remembers what was said.

“Maybe too much happened in between,” she said.

Havlik, who is 72 and lives in Baltimore, recalls every word.

“I never even talked to my husband about it. I told no one,” said Havlik, who has endured nightmares about that encounter. “I never forgot. Never, ever forgot.”

Growing up, the two were best friends, inseparable. The fact that Jung was Jewish and Havlik a Protestant couldn’t have mattered less.

Or more.

In 1940, the Germans removed Jung from a state school in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, where she and Havlik were classmates. Jung was forced to wear the Star of David on her clothes, forbidden to have contact with non-Jews. Havlik wondered why her friend was gone, but no one would explain.

The First Painful Misunderstanding

One day, Havlik saw Jung walking in the street. Why isn’t she on the sidewalk? Havlik thought. She approached Jung and said hello. Jung didn’t even look at her. Havlik was crushed.

“I thought for some reason that I did something terrible to her, but I couldn’t think what it could be,” she said. “My mother always told me, ‘Mind your own business. If she doesn’t want to speak to you, so be it.’ She knew what was happening, of course. But she wouldn’t tell me.”

Months later, a girl Havlik barely knew delivered a letter from Jung.

Please forgive me if I make a grammar mistake because I have not been attending school . . .

The Nazis had ordered Jung’s family to move to the Jewish ghetto of Terezin, northwest of Prague--a steppingstone to Auschwitz, Poland. Jung wanted to tell Havlik she was leaving and said to meet her in the hallway of a building where a dentist worked. Jung thought that if the two were caught, Havlik could claim she was just visiting the dentist, not her Jewish friend.

“They will take us away and kill us,” Jung told Havlik when they met.

It was evening, dark and cold. Next door, boys from a Jewish school performed a traditional dance.

Don’t be frightened, Havlik told Jung. She had seen a German movie about the camps. There was a handsome SS officer who helped a woman down from a train. There were houses with flowers in the windows.

“Don’t worry,” she told Jung. “This is a nice place. Haven’t you seen the movie?”

“We can’t go to the movies,” Jung said, while outside.

“I was so happy to see her that day, so happy that she was finally talking to me. I just wanted to cheer her up,” Havlik recalled. “Later on, I was so ashamed.”

Havlik, who thought Jung died in the camps, came to believe she played a part in her friend’s fate. She wishes she had told Jung to run away to the mountains where other refugees lived out the war. “But I didn’t do anything. Nobody did anything. It was like taking the sheep to the slaughter. The horrors she went through, I was spared.”

Jung believes the fact that she survived is nothing less than a miracle.

“I was lucky,” she said softly. “Very lucky. Truly lucky.”

Most prisoners flowed quickly through Terezin and on to the gas chambers. Jung was lucky that her sister’s involvement in a Zionist organization kept them, their mother, a cousin and an aunt on Jewish protective lists that the Germans allowed.

In May 1944, when her family was finally herded onto cattle cars and shipped to Auschwitz, Jung found luck amid the hardship once again.

They met a group who had been on a previous transport from Terezin. “That’s going to be us in six weeks,” one of them said, pointing to the smoke that spewed from the chimneys above the gas chambers. “But maybe not you.”

One way out was to be transferred to a labor camp. The old and the young weren’t wanted. Jung, who was 14, was a small girl who looked 12. She had an advantage, though. For some reason, her blond hair was never shaved. She spoke perfect German. To many, she was German.

Dr. Josef Mengele would judge whether she was fit to work. Jung stood before him naked.

“Sixteen,” Jung lied. “Gardener.”

Mengele looked into her green eyes.

“Small, but . . . “ and with a wave of his hand, he spared her.

Jung forestalled a quick death, but the prospect of a slow one loomed.

Her family was shipped to another camp near Berlin, where she worked through the winter on a road crew clearing tree stumps and rocks, in wooden shoes, a blanket around her shoulders to keep from freezing.

In February 1945, she was moved again as Germans forced thousands of prisoners to march from the approaching Russians. Jung’s journey to the Czech border lasted six weeks. She and her family--incredibly, they were still alive, still together--slept in barns or in the rain. There was little food. Those who fell behind were shot.

They came across a funeral procession. All these mourners dressed in black crying over just one person--how ridiculous, Jung thought.

They came across a rotten apple core in the road. It was given to Jung. She ate it, seeds, stem and all.

“It was the only time that I cried from hunger,” she says now. “But we knew that the war was coming to an end. We just had to hold on and survive.”

‘People Died Like Flies’

There was another train to another camp: Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, a place where nearly everyone starved to death.

“People died like flies,” Jung said of the place. No one had the strength to dig graves. The bodies were dragged from their bunks and stacked outdoors like cordwood. “We knew that we could survive, maybe, another week. No more.”

When British soldiers liberated the camp, Jung was 15. She weighed less than 60 pounds. Within days, her mother--emaciated and suffering from typhoid--died. She was 45.

Jung spent six months in a Swedish hospital recovering from typhoid, then returned to Ostrava. She went to Havlik’s home, but was told her friend had moved away. Today, Jung believes she may have gone to the wrong house.

Eventually, she moved to Israel. She married another concentration camp survivor. They had three boys. In 1959, the family immigrated to the United States. They have lived in Southern California ever since.

In Ostrava during the war, Havlik endured daily air raids. Afterward, she spent time hunting the streets for Jung.

“Ostrava was a bad place then,” Havlik said. “There were Czechs looking for each other. Germans looking for each other. Poles looking for each other. People told me to forget about [Jung]. ‘Be glad you’re alive’--that was always the answer.”

She had prayed to God to spare Jung. Now, she cursed God and swore she would never pray again.

Havlik took a job as a lab technician at a Czech chemical company. She would work with cyanide. She’d smell the fragrance of bitter almonds and imagine how powerful the odor must have been in the gas chambers. She thought of Miriam.

Havlik married and had a son. She had survived Hitler and fascism. Now, she was trying to survive Stalin and communism. Havlik and her husband were both chemical engineers, yet they lived in near poverty. In 1967, the family was allowed to take a trip to Italy. They never returned. They settled in Baltimore, where Havlik worked as an environmental engineer for the state of Maryland for 20 years.

Through it all, each woman never forgot the other.

When Jung traveled to Ostrava six years ago for the unveiling of a Jewish memorial, she met with a lawyer, a family friend, and asked if he could help her find Havlik. Nothing came of it.

Three years ago, on a trip to Prague, Havlik visited a synagogue where the walls are lined with the names of Czechs who died in concentration camps. She brought flowers, but left with a tantalizing clue: Jung’s name wasn’t there.

Then, last fall, a letter from a friend in Czechoslovakia suggested that Jung was alive.

Havlik hadn’t prayed in more than half a century, but now she thanked God and began to recite a prayer. Halfway through, she realized she couldn’t remember the words.

Havlik asked her husband to search the Internet for Jung. She contacted Jewish groups in Europe and Israel. She also called the national Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. A year earlier, Daniel Jung, Miriam’s son, had entered his parent’s names into the museum’s survivor registry while on a business trip.

Last week, the women revived their friendship. They spoke of old wounds. They filled in the gaps in each other’s memory. They talked of the time they sold paper flowers outside a synagogue to raise money for a Catholic charity, and the time they made angels in the snow.

A Dead End, Then the Answer

When they touched, they did so delicately, protectively.

Their meeting almost didn’t happen. The Holocaust museum never responded to Havlik’s initial inquiry. She decided to go to the museum, where she found Jung’s name herself.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I was crying like crazy.”

She wrote a letter to Jung that the museum said it would forward. Six weeks went by without a response. Havlik’s imagination drifted again to her last meeting with Jung, the one when they were 12, the one that has given her nightmares. She sent another letter via the museum.

You may be surprised that I remember you after so many years . . .

When the call finally came, Jung said that, of course, she remembered that day.

Thank you for coming to see me, she told Havlik.

You took a big risk, she said.

You showed a lot of courage.

They were words Havlik never expected to hear. Words she will remember the rest of her life.