Associate Editor

Long before globalization took hold, Jewish geography proved that it really is a small world after all.

Consider the case of Kal Zitwer and Jack Pavony. In the moment it takes to say "so maybe you know my uncle Morty from Poughkeepsie," their time-space continuum shrank radically.

Sixty-two years and some 4,000 miles vanished during a Yiddish club meeting in late May at the Landow House in Rockville, an assisted-living facility that is part of Charles E. Smith Life Communities.

Pavony, a new arrival at Landow House, mentioned to the other Yiddishists, including Zitwer, that he was a survivor of the infamous Mauthausen death camp, among other Nazi facilities.

Zitwer, it turns out, was a medic in the U.S. Army unit that liberated Mauthausen in May 1945. Although the two men previously had never met (and were actually about a half-mile from each other during the liberation), an instantaneous bond was formed.

"I remember it being quite an emotional moment," said Pavony's son, Howard, 56, of Westchester County, N.Y.

His father, now 80, routinely refers to Zitwer as "my liberator."

Although the two men share a momentous slice of history, the similarity seems to end there. Zitwer, 86, is a practiced raconteur, a fast-quipping native New Yorker, "born, bred and buttered," as he put it, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He and his family moved to the Bronx when he was 10. He was drafted in 1943 via "a personalized letter from the president."

Pavony is quieter and more subdued, perhaps because of the extended nightmare he lived through as a teenager. Back then, he was known as Yaacov Hersh Piwonia, the only child of Chana and Avraham Piwonia, denizens of small-town Poland not far from Warsaw.

Pavony's first-person account of those years is laid out in a self-published memoir ‹ dictated in Yiddish and translated into English ‹ titled The Will to Live. Pavony's son and daughter presented it to him on his 60th birthday, and have since expanded it.

In the memoir, Pavony describes in chilling detail how he and his parents were rounded up, jammed into a suffocating cattle car and then deposited "at a place called Auschwitz" in November 1942.

His mother was immediately spirited away by a Nazi guard, never to be seen again. His father pleaded with him to stay close, "no matter how they might beat us, hit us, whatever will be," the memoir continues. His father, however, soon disappeared as well. When Pavony made that discovery, the memoir says, "I lay myself down and cried; I cried for weeks."

All told, Pavony spent three years in Auschwitz; then roughly seven weeks in Mauthausen (located in Austria); and finally another seven weeks in Ebensee, a subcamp of Mauthausan, located about a half-mile from the main camp.

During that period, he endured torture, repeated brutal beatings, severe illness and a midwinter "death march" that claimed thousands of victims.

When the liberation forces finally arrived at Ebensee, Pavony was initially stunned beyond comprehension. "People were kissing the tanks ... but I sat there like a dummy," he said in an interview last week at Landow House. "I didn't know what to do."

Any budding euphoria, however, was immediately stanched when the realization sank in that he had lost both of his parents. Preoccupied with simply staying alive day to day, he had repressed those thoughts for years. "Could this have really happened?" he said in his memoir.

Zitwer said although he had heard "rumors" of concentration camps being operated by the Nazis, he was not prepared for what he found when he finally arrived at Mauthausen. The death toll at the Mauthausen complex ‹ of which Ebensee was a major component ‹ has been estimated at 122,000 to 320,000.

Zitwer said he had heard that Jews were being gassed at concentration camps, but he was unaware that they were also being cremated assembly line-style ‹ until he saw the ovens firsthand at Mauthausen. "There were still ashes in them when I got there," he said. "I went a little bit overboard when I saw that. I had some terrible emotional feelings, but I tried to corral them."

Zitwer said the enormity of the Nazi horror also hit home once he heard Adam Weinreb, a gangrene-stricken 14-year-old survivor of Mauthausen (and other camps), relate his ordeal. Weinreb's entire family had perished in the Holocaust.

"I'm not cold-blooded, but I never really cried," said Zitwer, whose family was unscathed by the Shoah. "I felt it in my heart, and still do. I keep my emotions in check; that's my nature. Everyone has his defensive way of dealing with these things."

In the decades since the paths of Zitwer and Pavony nearly crossed, Zitwer worked for 30 years as a hand-typesetter at the U.S. Government Printing Office in Washington.

After immigrating to the United States and then settling in northern New Jersey, Pavony worked as a fabric embroiderer, ran a luncheonette in the Bronx and, finally, drove a taxi in New York until his retirement. His wife, also a camp survivor, died in 1958 of Hodgkin's disease. The inmate numbers tattooed on their forearms, Pavony pointed out as he rolled up his sleeve, both add up to 32, the age at which his wife died.

Pavony recently relocated to the Landow House to be near his daughter, Anat Bar-Cohen, who now lives in Washington ‹ after she had moved from Israel to Minneapolis.

"I've always thought that the twists and turns that made this meeting possible were amazing," said Howard Pavony.

"My dad's mantra has always been that we should do whatever we can to stay together as a family," said Bar-Cohen.

"God works in strange ways," said Zitwer.

Pavony was asked if he concurred with his "liberator."

He thought about it for a second. "I guess," he said with a shrug.