This is a story of two Jews.

One Polish. One American.

One a liberator, the other among the liberated.

They even share a similar name:

Frydman and Friedman.

They could have stared across a barbed-wire fence into one another’s eyes, had the details of history been only slightly different in the waning days of World War II.

And, but for the grace of God, their places on either side of that barbed-wire fence easily could have been reversed.

Lou Frydman, 72, lives in Lawrence. He is a retired associate professor in Kansas University’s School of Social Welfare.

A Holocaust survivor, he was liberated at age 15 from Allach, a subcamp of Dachau, in April 1945.

Joe Friedman, 83, is a retired podiatrist who went on to a successful career in the entertainment industry in New York City and, later, Los Angeles.

Friedman is a liberator, a former first lieutenant in the 4th Armored Division, 3rd Army, who was among the first U.S. soldiers to enter Ohrdruf, a satellite camp of Buchenwald, also in April 1945.

Lou Frydman, 72, is a retired Kansas University associate professor of social welfare and a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. The Lodz, Poland, native was captured by the Nazis in 1943 and interred in several German concentration camps, escaping death when the Dachau concentration camp he wound up in was liberated in April 1945. Frydman, along with Jews around the world, will mark Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday.

Ohrdruf was the first concentration camp in Germany liberated by the Western allies.

Friedman will speak about his experiences at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Lawrence Jewish Community Center, 917 Highland Drive.

Tuesday is also Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — a time when Jewish people around the world will commemorate the lives of six million Jews, and at least seven million of other faiths, who were killed in the Nazi campaign of hatred and genocide.

Shoah is the Hebrew word for destruction, and is another name used for the Holocaust.

At a time when the word liberation is much heard in the news and TV screens are filled with images of Iraqis greeting American troops with kisses, the two Jewish men shared their memories — in separate interviews — of that much darker time 58 years ago.

Lou Frydman plans to attend Joe Friedman’s talk Tuesday at the Jewish center.

Family hauled away

Frydman, who retired from KU about three years ago, has lived with his wife, Jane, in Lawrence since 1969. They’ve been married 48 years.

But he began his life in Poland, where he was born in the city of Lodz in 1930. He was 9 years old when Germany invaded his country Sept. 2, 1939.

“I was caught (by the Nazis) in the Warsaw Uprising in April 1943,” Frydman recalled.

“I was in a bunker of 400 people. We were prepared for the onslaught. They got to us by picking up sound with sound detectors. We were dynamited for nine days before they broke through to us. Then, through loudspeakers, they said, ‘Would you like to fight us, or would you like to surrender?’ We had two revolvers, and I don’t think either of them worked.”

Frydman’s father was executed on the spot in the Warsaw ghetto. The rest of his family was transported into the system of concentration camps and subcamps in Poland. He was 12.

“I left my mother in the first camp they took us. In that camp, they called upon people who were master metalworkers, and my mother told my brother and I to volunteer for it,” he said.

“It was a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old, and they took us because they had killed the (adult) men, and they had an order for 700 expert metalworking men, so we qualified. We went to this camp, Budzyn.”

Budzyn became a satellite of the Majdanek death camp in October 1943.

Frydman’s mother and other family members remained behind in another part of the Majdanek concentration camp system.

“They couldn’t have survived beyond November 1944, because (the Nazis) killed all the Jews in Majdanek. Budzyn was the only camp that wasn’t liquidated,” Frydman said.

Forty-two thousand Jews were murdered Nov. 4-5 in the rest of the Majdanek system. But not Frydman’s camp.

Slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, are shown after liberation of the camp in April 1945. Joe Friedman, who was a first lieutenant Army and a Buchenwald liberator, will speak about his experiences on Tuesday in Lawrence at Yom HaShoah -- Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“Mine was spared. I never saw anybody from my family after I raised my hand and was selected to go to Budzyn.”

‘You can’t forget this’

While Lou Frydman was a prisoner in a series of Nazi concentration camps, another young Jewish man, Joe Friedman, was serving in the U.S. Army.

“The war progressed so fast after (the Allies retook) Bastogne, and we started getting German prisoners of war in the spring of ’45. We saw them in droves,” Friedman said.

“I was 24, by then a first lieutenant, and I had a litter-bearer platoon. We crossed the Rhine into Germany, and (Gen. George S.) Patton went very fast, and the Germans started surrendering.

“All of a sudden, we saw this smoke emanating from an area that later turned out to be Ohrdruf.”

The first thing the soldiers came upon were the bodies of 81 prisoners who had been murdered by SS guards who fled the camp as the Army approached.

“These were (the bodies of) slave laborers. And then we saw the barracks, we saw men wandering around in a daze. We were seeing emaciated bodies that were still able to walk. These were people who were barely alive. The guards had tried to kill as many as they could before they abandoned the camp,” Friedman said.

The scene was like nothing Friedman had ever witnessed.

“The stench was unbearable. There was no sanitation. They were wearing, of course, the striped pajamas. Many of them were walking out in rags to greet us,” he said.

The soldiers did what they could to help the prisoners.

Lou Frydman pictured at right, is shown after his liberation at age 15 in this photograph taken in 1946 in Heidelberg, Germany, along with his older brother Abraham, left, and friend Moniek Wolman, center.

“We gave them whatever we had. We had to be very careful. Their stomachs were about the size of a plum, and if you started to give them solids, their stomachs burst, and that happened,” Friedman said.

“We were numb. When this hits you, you can’t fathom the depravity of man. You’ve never seen a skeleton that walks. All I can say is that it wasn’t easy … you can’t forget this. Once you smell the smoke, the burning flesh, it stays in your nostrils forever.”

Death march

Lou Frydman was imprisoned in a number of concentration camps and subcamps; he believes the total was between seven and nine.

“The main groups were Majdanek, Natzweiler and Dachau. The reason that Natzweiler is not so well known is that the Jews were overall minorities in Natzweiler. It didn’t fit into the gestalt of the Holocaust,” he said.

The 42nd Rainbow Division, U.S. 7th Army, liberated Frydman from Allach, a subcamp of Dachau, on April 29, 1945. He was 15.

“When I was liberated, I was unconscious. I missed the liberation. All I know, the last thing was from Natzweiler to Dachau, an unbelievable death march, and by the time I got to Dachau, I was half conscious,” he recalled.

“In Dachau, I was lying on my bunk, and the next thing I was in an American Air Force hospital. I have no idea how I was rescued, how long I was in the hospital, what I was sick from. The people were talking a strange language.” That language was American English.

From the hospital, Frydman was returned to Allach, where former inmates were kept under guard for a month to contain a typhus epidemic.

“When you say, ‘What do you remember about being liberated?’ I say, ‘Nothing.'”

After Allach, he was put into a displaced persons camp, where survivors waited to be repatriated to their home nations, or emigrate to a new country.

“I was in a DP camp, and anybody who came in, I kept checking on Abe Frydman (his older brother). Finally, somebody said, ‘There is someone by that name in Stuttgart,'” Frydman said.

“I never expected me to survive, but I expected him to survive. I found him three months after liberation. He was the only one.”

Frydman lost about 40 members of his immediate and extended family in the Holocaust.

Abraham Frydman, 74, now lives in New York.

Recording their experiences

The American soldiers who stumbled upon Ohrdruf did not know what to make of their discovery.

Battle-hardened by years of combat did not prepare them for the scene.

¢ The Holocaust Commission – Yom Hashoah¢ Hillel – About Yom HaShoah

“Word was coming back, we knew that (the Nazis) were committing these atrocities, but we didn’t know to what extent, the depravity of the human beings who would do something like this. No matter who you talk to about this, to a person they’ll tell you that they couldn’t imagine that this was happening,” he said.

The sights Friedman saw at Ohrdruf changed him.

“Once you hear their cries, you realize that there but for the grace of God, I could be one of them. You realize how tenuous life is; you could be gone in a minute,” he said.

“I realized that if you don’t do what you want to do in life, you never know when it’s going to be cut off. You better live each day to the fullest and make a contribution to humanity.”

Friedman returned to St. Joseph, Mo., after the war and practiced podiatry from 1949 to 1962. He became active in community theater, and later turned it into a career in the entertainment business.

He lived in New York City for 10 years, performing in Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. Friedman moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and lived there for 25 years.

In 1989, he received an Emmy Award for his work doing research and documentation on a National Geographic documentary titled “Secrets of the Titanic.”

He returned with his wife, Gladys, to St. Joseph in 1994, where she died in 1995. The couple had one son, who died of leukemia two years before Gladys Friedman died.

Joe Friedman has one grandson and a daughter-in-law who live in Forest Hills, in Queens, New York.

In October 1996, Friedman was invited by the United States government, as a concentration camp liberator, to be interviewed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The result was a four-hour oral history.

In April 1998, director Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation — which has digitally collected the testimonies of 50,000 eyewitnesses to the Holocaust — sent an interviewer and cameraman to Frydman’s home in St. Joseph.

The visit resulted in a five-hour oral history of the horrors of the Ohrdruf concentration camp.

Today, Friedman lectures often about his experiences to high school students in and around St. Joseph.

“I challenge anyone to say that this (the Holocaust) didn’t happen,” he said.

Lou Frydman retired from KU in 2000. Jane Frydman, who has a doctorate in psychology and a law degree from KU, is a retired attorney.

Lou’s story was recorded by the Shoah Foundation in 1995. His experiences also are on tape at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.

The couple has three children: Dan, 46, a social worker in St. Joseph; and John, 45, and Rick, 43, both Lawrence attorneys.

Lou and Jane have five grandchildren within walking distance of their home.

“God is trying to make up,” Lou said.