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Imagine being 11 years old and leading a happy existence in a peaceful mountain town, in a place where both your parents are well-known and respected. Then imagine that while listening to the radio one day you hear a strange speech by an angry man in another country, and after that your pleasant life begins to unravel until nearly everything and everyone you love is stolen, abused, murdered or swept away and your own survival looks brutally unlikely.

Sam Young doesn't need an imagination to conjure up this grim scenario — he lived it personally and nearly died many times before he finally escaped this waking nightmare that lasted for years. Until it actually happened, Young and millions of other Europeans like him could not have believed the scale of death and suffering that would be wrought by World War II.

Young, 85, is a survivor of the Shoah, the Hebrew word for the genocidial Holocaust waged by the German Nazis and their allies. Sam and his wife Betty have lived on the Keene Ranch near Tehachapi for 30 years now and Sam is well-known and respected in the Tehachapi area, but you cannot fully take the measure of this admirable man unless you know the circumstances of his earlier life.

Most of us think we already know all about the Holocaust and may summarize this rolling atrocity as “the Polish Jews being sent to German concentration camps where most of them died,” but the actual scale was much larger, more complicated and involved many other countries as well.

Sam's own narrative illustrates how large and dark a shadow the Nazis and other Axis forces cast upon Europe, and also how complex life can be through no fault of your own. This is his story.

Sam was born in the eastern Czechoslovakian town of Sevlus on Dec. 22, 1922. His father was Dr. Ignatz Josipovics (pronounced Yosi-po-vits), a popular physician in town and his mother was from a farming family and owned two nearby farms. His mother was also born in Sevlus, known for its grape vineyards, and his father was born in a neighboring town.

Sevlus had approximately 12,000 people and about 1,200 Jewish families, including the Josipovics. A variety of ethnicities could be found in Sevlus and yet people got along together with little sign of friction.

“Czechoslovakia was a very democratic country and the population consisted of Czechs, Slovaks, Jews, Germans, Hungarians and Rutanians (a Russian-speaking minority),” Sam recalls. “Basically, they all lived peacefully and worked together.”

Sam even went Christmas caroling with young Christian friends, who were jealous when Hannukah came around and lasted for eight days because Sam kept getting presents each day. “We were friends and neighbors and people mostly got along together,” Sam explains. “We had a very good life until 1933.”

It was in that year that an 11-year-old Sam first heard a speech by the radical German chancellor Adolph Hitler.

“I remember like it was yesterday, listening to Hitler's talk accusing Jews of being behind all the problems of the world,” Sam says. “There weren't many radios in town and they had one set up near a movie theater so people could hear it. Hitler spoke German but I spoke German as well so I understood what he was saying.”

Sam thought that Hitler's speech was odd and repellent, but he was not really worried by what he heard.

“His speech was so far-fetched that he wasn't taken very seriously in Sevlus,” Sam notes. “No one thought that what did happen could happen — it would have been unbelievable.”

Poisoning the well

After Hitler’s rant was broadcast, nothing was done officially but anti-Semitism began to be expressed more openly, Sam remembered, and tension grew between the different ethnic groups. The ties that held society together beginning to fray…
With hostility to Jews growing, Sam’s parents took him out of the town public school and enrolled him in a Hebrew school. It was a good school and it was attended by most of the town’s Jewish youth.

While the Czechs had a good military, they were forced to make concessions to Hitler and the Germans as a result of the Munich Pact, in which British Prime Minister Chamberlain and other world leaders decided to deal with the growing menace through a policy known as appeasement — basically, “let’s give them what they want and hopefully they’ll leave us alone.”

What the Germans wanted most was part of Czechoslovakia known as Sudentenland, which was home to many ethnic Germans. Great Britain and the other allies ceded Sudentenland to Germany and the Czechs had no choice but to give it to them.

The beast that was Nazi Germany had begun to devour Europe. Austria was next. “Things went from bad to worse day by day once they gave in to Hitler,” Sam remembers.

Eastern Europe was full of contested borders with a bewildering assortment of groups making claims. Sam’s town of Sevlus was close to Hungary, Romania, Poland and Ukraine. Once Hitler began taking territory, other nations eyed their neighbors greedily. Hungary claimed the portion of Czechoslovakia where Sam lived.

“The Hungarians started a group to terrorize the people,” Sam says. “Then a Ukrainian man organized a bunch of the young men from our area to fight the Hungarians. Many of them had never held a rifle before. The Hungarian soldiers killed hundreds of them and tossed them in the river. Their bodies floated down the Tisza River for months.”

The Ukrainian who had “led” the resistance had appeared in Sam’s father’s office before the fighting and insisted that Dr. Josipovics bandage and cast up his arm so he wouldn’t have to fight — even though he wasn’t even injured.

In 1938, as the situation continued to deteriorate, a cousin of Sam’s who lived in America was sent to warn the family to leave. They declined.

“My father had an established medical practice and my mother had her farms, so they didn’t want to leave,” Sam explained. “Medicine was my father’s life and he treated everyone — gypsies, barons, the whole community. Our house and the attached doctor’s office was in the center of the city and everyone knew us. No one believed things would get as bad as they did.”

Something wicked this way comes

The problems really started for the Josipovics and other Jewish families in July of 1941. It was the summer vacation from school, and Sam always spent his summers working on his mother’s family farm, which was a short distance outside town.There was no electricity or phone, and one day his parents sent word by a neighbor that Sam needed to come home right away.

The 18-year-old rode his bike over the 2-1/2 miles back home, wondering what was going on. When he got home, there were Hungarian policemen at the house.
“They were very polite and they told my mother to just pack for one night, they were going to the train station but that we would be back home in a day or two,” Sam says. Sam, his father, mother and younger sister went together.

When they go the train station, the family was surprised to find not passenger cars but boxcars. About 200 people, almost all of them from the town’s Jewish community, were loaded into the boxcars. They were told they were being taken to the nearby town of Khust, inside the Polish border, but the train kept moving and near nightfall, they found themselves in the Carpathian mountains. The people were unloaded and locked in a mountain sawmill for the night.

“In the morning, they started calling out the families by name,” Sam remembered. “We had to surrender all money, jewelry and documents — they took everything. The soldiers didn’t explain why or what was going on. After they had taken everything, they loaded us into the back of military trucks.”

“Shoot him at the next stop”

The trucks made slow progress, since territorial fighting had destroyed the bridges and damaged the roads. The passengers had to get off the trucks frequently while the trucks forded creeks or skirted obstacles.

At one of these stops, an older woman was injured while getting out of a vehicle. The call went out for a doctor and Sam’s father was quick to respond. He tended to the injured woman and then returned to the truck where he had been riding. He was the last one in and a Hungarian soldier raised his rifle in a motion to hit him.
Sam saw the menacing gesture and raised his arm defiantly to block the assault. “Don’t you dare hit my father,” the teenager snarled at the soldier.

The soldier lowered his gun and glared at Sam. With everyone in, the trucks began to move once more. Sam sat up near the cab while his little sister was near the back.

She overheard two of the soldiers talking. One of them eyed Sam and instructed “Shoot him at the next stop.” The frightened girl whispered the remark to her mother, and Sam’s parents quietly passed the warning forward to him.

The trucks rumbled along until finally they stopped near an old cemetery and the passengers were again ordered out. The minute the trucks stopped, Sam leapt out and jumped over a 4-foot stone wall surrounding the cemetery and hid down against the stones. The soldiers looked for him but didn’t find him.

Then the officer in charge addressed the group and said that they should never dare to go back to Hungary. Without explanation, the soldiers then drove away, leaving the confused Sevlus residents behind.

“We didn’t know where to go, we didn’t know what to do, we didn’t even know where we were,” Sam explains. “We had been told nothing. Only to never return to our homes.”

A group of civilians with guns and armbands soon surrounded the weary, hungry group and told them that they should leave. The refugees didn’t know where to go, so the townspeople led them to a big barn outside the small village of Jagelnica.
“They had once raised racehorses in that barn, but it was empty except for some dead colts,” Sam says. “There was water but no food. Some local Jews and Poles heard we were there and brought some food, but they had little to share.”

The coldest winter ever

One of the men who had escorted the refugees to the barn was the mayor of Jagelnica, and it happened that his wife was ill. He asked Sam’s father to examine his wife to see if he could help her, and Sam’s father immediately agreed. A quick friendship of sorts sprang up between the two men.

Dr. Josipovics asked if there were any other physicians in the village. He was told that there was a Polish doctor named Wojciech Lachowicz (pronounced Lack-o-vits). Sam’s father asked to meet him.It would prove to be a fateful meeting that would tie the two families together for decades.

The story of Holocaust survivor Sam Young will continue in next week’s Pen In Hand column. Your patience in following this remarkable tale will be rewarded.
Have a good week.