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Out of forgiveness came life of love
Holocaust survivors meet, marry after war
AP Photo
Herman and Roma Rosenblat met when he was a teenager held in a concentration camp and she lived in the village. Years later, they were introduced and married.
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Published: October 13, 2008
NORTH MIAMI BEACH, Fla.
In the beginning, there was a boy, a girl and an apple.
He was a teenager in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. She was a bit younger, living in the village. Their eyes met through a barbed-wire fence, and she wondered what she could do for this handsome young man.
She was carrying apples and decided to throw one over the fence. He caught it and ran away toward the barracks. And so it began.
As they tell it, they returned the next day, and she tossed an apple again. And each day after that, for months, the routine continued.
They never knew one another's name, never uttered a single word, so fearful they'd be spotted by a guard. Until one day he came to the fence and told her he wouldn't be back.
"I won't see you anymore," she said. "Right, right. Don't come around anymore," he answered. And so their brief and innocent tryst came to an end. Or so they thought.
Not long after, the Russians rolled in and liberated Herman Rosenblat's camp. The war was over. The girl, Roma Radziki, went to nursing school in Israel. He went to London and learned to be an electrician.
Their daily ritual faded from their minds.
Rosenblat eventually moved to New York. He was running a television-repair shop when a friend wanted to fix him up with a girl.
It went well enough. Conversation flowed, and eventually talk turned to the war. Rosenblat recited the litany of camps he had been in, and Radziki's ears perked up. She had been in Schlieben, too.
She spoke of a boy she would visit, of how he was sent away. And then, the words that would change their lives forever: "That was me," he said.
Rosenblat proposed that very night. She thought he was crazy. Two months later she said yes. In 1958, they were married.
He believes the lesson of their reunion is the very one his father imparted before his death: forgiveness.
The anger of the concentration camps, Rosenblat says, has gone. And his life has been filled with love.
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