Message brings Holocaust survivors together

The Holocaust separated Robert Spitz from his childhood friends.

The Internet brought them back together.

Spitz, 78, a retiree who lives in North Raleigh, thought his upbringing in Budapest, Hungary, and his travails at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany, were part of the past.

But when his friend Bill Jasper of Raleigh asked him to translate an e-mail message he got from a friend in Hungarian, Spitz's past came rushing back.

"I think I know this man," Spitz told Jasper, referring to the message writer, Tomi Komlos.

Turns out, Spitz went to school with a boy named Robert Komlos. Robert had a kid brother named Tomi. Could it be that Jasper's friend Tomi was the brother of Spitz's classmate from all those years ago?

In the two months since that message, Spitz has struck up an e-mail correspondence not only with Tomi Komlos, but with 13 other Jewish friends from his school days in Budapest. They now communicate via e-mail and Skype, a software program that allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet.

Spitz's old buddies even e-mailed him photos they had of him from the early 1940s. After the war, Spitz couldn't go back to Hungary because it was under Communist dictatorship. He had no mementos from his childhood and no photographs to speak of.

"I thought I was a person who never believed in miracles," Spitz said. "This was a miracle."

Loaded on cattle train

Budapest once boasted a Jewish population of more than 200,000. Only half survived the war.

In 1944, Spitz and his father were picked up on the streets of Budapest and forced onto freight cars bound for Bergen-Belsen.

Spitz survived the camp. About March 1945, he was loaded onto a cattle train, which was liberated by the U.S. Army. By then, he weighed 62 pounds and was suffering from typhus.

So grateful was he to the Americans for providing him medical help and later offering him a job as an interpreter, he was happy to put his past behind him.

Arriving in the United States in 1949, he lived in Columbia, S.C., then in Kansas City and Dallas, before retiring to North Raleigh.

For Spitz's classmates -- three live in Budapest and 11 in Israel -- the news that he was still living came like a bolt from the sky.

"Everybody think he dead in Auschwitz," wrote Tomi Komlos, in imperfect English.

As for Robert Komlos, Tomi's brother and Spitz's classmate, he died in a car accident 18 years ago. Tomi now takes his brother's place in a close-knit group of Hungarian classmates who meet regularly in Israel.

Spitz would love to see his old buddies. But a second hip replacement has left him too frail to travel.

Tomi Komlos recently e-mailed Spitz to tell him the group gathered for dinner recently and raised a glass in his honor.

"L'chaim," they clicked. "To life."