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Last week's column told the story of Tehachapi-area resident Sam Young, a Czechoslovakian Jew who survived the Holocaust and the horrors of World War II in Europe. When the narrative left off, the 18-year-old Sam and his family were among a group of Czechoslovakian Jews who were kidnapped from their village of Sevlus by Hungarian police and soldiers and taken to Poland and abandoned, told never to return to their homes.

After spending the night in a racehorse barn, the group dispersed but Sam's father, who was a doctor, and the rest of the family were brought to a big house built into a hillside. A houseboy told them to go downstairs, and there they found a meal of boiled eggs, bread and milk.

“It was a tremendous meal for the four of us,” Sam remembers. “We really hadn't eaten since we were taken from our home two days earlier.”

After each family member had gotten to bathe, they met the owner of the home: a Polish physician named Dr. Lachowics, who housed the four members of Sam's family for the next year.

“He was the kindest, most wonderful person I've ever had anything to do with,” Sam says. “He opened his house to us, total strangers, and saw to it that we had a chance to eat and clean up before meeting us.”

Dr. Lachowics (pronounced Lock-o-vits) was the only doctor in Jagelnika, so Sam's father, Dr. Josipovics, helped the Polish doctor tend to the needy residents, who referred to Sam's father as “the Hungarian Doctor.”

“The conditions in this Polish village were miserable,” Sam recalls. “Most of the able-bodied people were gone to the war — there was mostly just women, children and old people left. There was no store, no pharmacy, no money. About the only medicine available was what the people found in the forest left behind by retreating Russian forces.”

The Germans made life nearly unbearable for the Poles. “The Germans wouldn't allow the flour mills to operate, so people would sneak in at night and grind what grain they could to make a little flour,” Sam said. “People also weren't allowed to cut wood, so they would cut wood secretly at night in the snow with little sharp saws. The Germans even took any furs of any kind that the people had owned.”

The winter was brutal, with temperatures that dropped to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

“There was no wood for heat or cooking, so we burned the fruit trees in Dr. Lachowics's orchard, tree by tree,” Sam explains. “There was a walnut tree that we burned and then even dug up the roots and burned them because we had nothing else. Snow drifted as high as the telephone lines. To even survive a day was hard.”

Having to sneak back to their own home

The family did make it through the winter and after a year spent in Poland, the Yosipovics family decided to try to sneak back to their former village of Sevlus. A group of about 12 people, traveling mostly by foot at night, started back across the Carpathian Mountains to home.

As they neared the heavily guarded border, a sympathetic Jewish man paid a Ukrainian smuggler to get the little group back into Czechoslovakia, a portion that was claimed by Nazi ally Hungary.

“He moved us at night and we snuck across between patrols by border sentries,” Sam said. “He knew every step in the dark. When we crossed the border the mountains were so steep that we had to slide down but we made it.”

Back in Sevlus again, Sam's father began to quietly practice medicine again while Sam worked on the family farm outside town. The main house was occupied by someone else so the Josipovicses lived in a smaller house on the property that had been stolen from them.

When the Russians came back into Poland as the tide turned against the Germans, some Russian soldiers came to Dr. Lachowics' house and told him his services were needed. He went, and this kindest of men was never seen or heard from again.

“My father did everything he could to find Dr. Lachowics or discover what had happened to him, but to no avail,” Sam says sadly. Sam's family helped support the doctor's widow and daughter and to this day, Sam sends money to Dr. Lachowics' daughter and granddaughters.

That's right — after 60 years, Sam still sends money to Poland to help that family that helped his family. Loyalty and gratitude are well-tended lamps that can burn bright through many decades…

Sent to slow death in a labor camp

In 1943, Sam turned 21 and had to report to the Hungarian Army for labor. Most of those Jewish men who went to the work camps died or got killed.

“The camp I was sent to was in a swamp, and we slept in an unfinished concrete building without doors, windows or a roof,” Sam said. “It was so cold and the only food was rye bread and black 'coffee' made from chicory.”

Luckily for Sam, the camp had eight horses — four coach horses and four plow horses, and these abused animals bit and kicked and were difficult to handle. An old sergeant noticed that Sam, with years of farm experience, could work with the horses so Sam was made a groomsman and got to sleep in the much-warmer barn.
As terrible as conditions were, they could have been much worse except the camp commander, Col. Imre Reviczky of the 10th Labor Division, did what he could to help the unfortunate slave laborers at the camp.

After the war, Col. Reviczky was demoted and stripped of his pension for failing to send Jewish laborers to the front or to death camps. The Jewish community interceded on his behalf, however, and got his rank restored and even supported his widow financially after he died. Many of the good deeds and heroism of WWII were not forgotten.

By this time Sam had gotten a Hungarian Jewish girlfriend named Irene who bravely worked with the Hungarian Resistance, secretly helping Jews and others and undermining the Axis government.

Sam learned from Irene that there was a “technical camp” in Budapest where conditions were better for the laborers. Sam claimed to be a tool-and-die maker, and though he was no machinist, he learned quickly and found conditions were indeed better, at least until the British began daily bombings that targeted munitions factories.

Though intended to destroy the factories, it was the hapless workers, forced to be there, who suffered the most in the bombings.

“The British bombing destroyed every single building in the camp, including the barracks where we slept,” Sam remembers. “With the camp destroyed, we were moved 50 miles away to a knitting factory that was taken over and converted to military purposes.”

In 1944, Sam's father, mother, younger sister Handa and all four grandparents were sent to camps. One grandmother was the only grandparent to survive the ordeal.
Sam's girlfriend Irene had friends in the Hungarian Underground prepare forged documents for him and helped Sam escape from the plant in the old knitting factory. He was later caught by the dreaded Hungarian Red Arrow (similar to the German Gestapo) and badly beaten, imprisoned in a house for three days until some Germans came by needing workers and he was released to work again.

At last the shadow lifts

In January of 1945, the Germans retreated before the advancing Russian Army and Sam was finally free to return home. He found that both his parents and his sister had survived imprisonment at a camp, and the Yosipovicses — alone among 1,200 Jewish families that had lived in Sevlus — had made it through the war with the immediate family intact. They were the only ones.

The horrors, the obscene deprivation and grotesque suffering that Sam witnessed are difficult for him to contemplate even now.

“I saw a tall man who was so emaciated that his lips couldn't cover his teeth any more, and I watched him die, starved to death clutching a raw potato in his bony hand that he couldn't even eat,” Sam relates quietly. “There were so many unthinkable scenes like that. When I was working all the time, my mind was kept busy with other thoughts. Now that I'm retired, this damn thing is coming back to me — after 60 years! I wake up sweating.”

After returning to his hometown, Sam was pressed into service by the Russians, ordered to be in charge of food distribution and economic development (“As though there was any economy left,” Sam says wryly) and forced to run a bakery. When flour was difficult to obtain, Sam was threatened with deportation to Siberia, a virtual death sentence.

He and Irene, who became his wife, escape to Prague and Sam became a university student. When Czechoslovakia beca

me communist, the government wanted to draft Sam for three years.
“I told my wife that I'd had a bellyful of armies and wanted nothing to do with it,” Sam says.

To a new land and a new life

With the help of the U.S. Embassy in Prague, Sam and Irene obtained visas and immigrated to America, arriving in New York on Aug. 13, 1946. Sam was advised to Anglocize the difficult-to-pronounce name “Yosipovics” so it became “Young.” After living briefly in Detroit, the young couple moved to Los Angeles.

Sam's first job was in a lumber yard making $30 a week, but eventually started a construction business with his brother-in-law. “We were very successful, and we built thousands of good-quality houses,” Sam says.

Sam's parents and sister also emigrated to America and his father, the brave Dr. Ignatz Yosipovics, practiced medicine in New York until he retired at 70 and moved to Los Angeles.

Sam bought the Keene Ranch in 1960 and his life was mostly good. His beloved wife Irene, who had helped him survive the war, died in 1971 as a result of improper medication from the same physician who was treating Marilyn Monroe at the time of her death.

Sam married Betty Nash in 1973 and they moved to the Keene Ranch fulltime in 1978, where they still live today, surrounded by beautiful mountains and ranchland. Sam's sister Handa, now 83, lives in Hollywood.

“It was strictly luck that we survived,” explains Sam matter-of-factly. “I tried for years to forget everything that happened. I wouldn't look at photos in Holocaust museums. It's very difficult. This was a tremendous atrocity — 51 million people of many different nationalities died. What they suffered and went through was unbelievable.”

Sam insists that his own compelling story is not significant.

“What happened to me is not important,” he states. “What is important is ensuring that it doesn't happen again to other people in other places. History has no value if you don't learn from it.”

Sam Young's incredible life experience is worth remembering, and I am grateful to him for his willingness to share it with you and me, difficult and painful though it is for him to relive.

And thank you for your patience and persistence in following this epic story.