Reunited After 76 Years: 'I Thought The Entire Family Was Murdered'

Two friends who survived the holocaust have met for the first time since separating in Brussels in 1941.

Alice Gerstel Weit was 12 when she bid an emotional farewell to her family's closest friends in October 1941, hoping to see them again.

After more than 70 years of assuming the family had been killed, Ms Gerstel Weit has met "Little Simon" Gronowski again.

Ms Gerstel Weit and her Jewish family hid in the Gronowski's home for nearly two weeks.

But the Gerstel Weit family only avoided Auschwitz after leaving their friends’ home and fleeing the continent.

Ms Gerstel Weit’s father sent word from France of a deal to get her family out of Nazi-occupied Belgium.

He was a diamond dealer who decided to turn his diamonds into cash in a bid to keep his loved ones safe.

The father of four children bought visas that got his family and brother's family through Nazi-occupied France and to the French-controlled Moroccan city of Casablanca.

There they boarded a ship bound for Cuba.

Meanwhile, the Gronowskis, also Jewish, decided to stay in Belgium.

They hid for 18 months but the Nazis eventually came - putting Mr Gronowski, his sister and mother on a train to Auschwitz.

"I thought the entire family was murdered. I had no idea," Ms Gerstel Weit said, the day after their reunion at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

"You didn't know that I jumped off the train?" asked Mr Gronowski, now 86.

"No, no. I didn't know anything," his 89-year-old friend replied.

"I didn't recognise him at all. I don't see Little Simon," Mrs Gerstel Weit said. "But he's here. Little Simon is here."

Mr Gronowski was an 11-year-old boy when he made one of the most daring escapes of the war.

"My father was not very conscious to tension. My father was not political. He was a poet. He wrote in six languages."

"And like so many of the families he remembered in Brussels," he continued, "he cannot believe that in Europe of the 20th century, of that civilisation, he cannot believe that Germany can fall into barbarism."

When the Nazis arrived, Mr Gronowski's father evaded the death camp because he was in hospital.

His family at home were found and sent to Auschwitz. His wife told the Nazis he was dead and spared him from Auschwitz.

On a train to the death camp, she saved her son too by pushing him towards the door and telling him to jump.

It was 19 April 1943, and the door to one car on the train was opened by members of the Belgian resistance.

The rescue is now known as the most significant rescue action taken during World War II of a train taking prisoners to the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland.

In total, 231 deportees fled from the train that night. 26 of them were killed, and another 116 were recaptured – another 116 were successful in their escape.

The youngest of those who got away was Simon Gronowski.

After the war, Simon reunited with his father and eventually moved back to the apartment where he grew up. He rented out the other units and used the money to study law.

Mrs Gerstel Weit's family immigrated to the United States, where she married, had two sons and eventually settled in Los Angeles and a career in real estate.

After the war, her family tried to locate her friend's family.

Mr Gronowski eventually wrote back to her late older brother Zoltan, telling him his sister and mother had died at Auschwitz and his father had since passed away.

Zoltan never told his family "Little Simon" survived. She learned he was alive six months ago when her nephew searched online for family history.

He had come across Mr Gronowski's 2002 memoir, The Child Of The 20th Train.

Mr Gronowski believes Mrs Gerstel Weit's brother was too distraught to say much about his family.

His own father never came to terms with the Holocaust either, he said.

For a time, Leon Gronowski held out hope his wife and daughter somehow survived.

"But when we received information of the concentration camps, the gas chamber, the mountains of corpses, my father understood that his wife and his daughter would not come back. And he died of ...," he said, his voice trailing off.

"Of a broken heart?" Mrs Gerstel Weit asked.

"Of a broken heart," he replied.

The two will return to the museum on Sunday to recount to visitors how the Holocaust ripped apart families.