05/07/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EGU5MHC82/?mibextid=wwXIfr
It was a black-tie gala in Boca Raton, Florida, on the evening of March 20, 2022.
The annual South Florida dinner of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Two ninety-seven-year-old men were in the room.
One was at the head table, being honored for decades of Holocaust education. He had just stood up to speak. His name was Sam Ron.
The other was an audience guest at a table near the back. His name was Jack Waksal.
When the speaker introduced himself, he mentioned his birth name — Shmuel Rakowski — and the Polish labor camp where he had been a teenage prisoner.
He said the name of the camp.
Pionki.
A man at the back of the room sat up very straight.
Jack Waksal had been at Pionki.
For an entire year of his teenage life, he had shoveled coal side by side with another Jewish boy in that same camp. He had not seen that boy since 1944.
When the speech ended, the 97-year-old Jack Waksal got up from his table, walked across the ballroom, and stopped in front of the head table.
He said: You're my brother.
The keynote speaker stared at him. Then he stood up. He took the man in front of him by the shoulders and looked at him.
He said: Jack?
They embraced in front of Sam's wife, his children, and his grandchildren.
It had been seventy-nine years.
They had both been born in 1924. Both Polish Jewish boys. Jack had grown up in Jedlinsk, in central Poland. Sam had grown up in a town near Kraków. They had not known each other before the war.
Both, as teenagers, had been moved through ghettos and into labor camps.
Jack had nearly been taken once. A guard had ordered him to kneel by the edge of a mass grave. Jack, in a single fast motion, had grabbed the guard and pulled him into the grave with him, then scrambled out and ran into the forest. He was caught a few weeks later and sent to Pionki.
Sam, separately, had been ordered into the showers on his arrival at Pionki. He and the men around him had no way of knowing whether the faucets would deliver water or gas. They stood under the shower heads, waiting.
Water came out.
One of the older men immediately started to sing the Hebrew song Mayim Chayim — Living Waters. Everyone in the room joined in.
Pionki was the largest ammunition factory in Poland.
Jewish prisoners were forced to shovel coal — hour after hour, day after day — to feed the ovens that generated the power to make gunpowder for German artillery.
Jack and Sam were assigned to the same shift. They worked side by side. They unloaded coal from trains. They pushed it into the ovens.
Jack later said simply:
When we worked, we worked as a team, always. We helped each other.
Hundreds of people in the camp died — from cold, from hunger, from beatings. It was not unusual to wake up and find the person on the bunk next to you had died in the night.
But they had each other.
They worked together for almost a year.
In 1944, the camp began to be dismantled.
A rumor went around that the prisoners were going to be sent to Auschwitz.
Jack decided to escape. He told Sam. He asked Sam to come.
Sam thought about it. Both choices were dangerous. He could not bring himself to make either one. In the end, he stayed.
Jack escaped that night with his brother and fourteen others. They lived in the forest, in winter, for six months. They survived on what the surrounding villages would give them. They were freed when the war ended.
Sam was put on a train to Sachsenhausen, a camp near Berlin. Then, in early 1945, he was sent on a death march that lasted three weeks. He did not eat for more than a week of it.
The American army found him on the road and liberated his column. He weighed less than a hundred pounds.
After the war, Jack came to the United States and settled in Dayton, Ohio. He built a scrapyard. He raised a family. He lost his parents, two sisters, and a brother in the Holocaust — making him the only survivor of his immediate family.
Sam joined an underground organization called B'richa that helped Jewish orphans reach Palestine. He briefly moved to Israel.
In 1956, he came to the United States and settled in Canton, Ohio.
Canton is approximately two hundred miles from Dayton.
For the next thirty-six years, Jack Waksal and Sam Ron lived two hundred miles from each other in the same state.
Neither one knew.
When they retired, both moved to South Florida.
Jack to Bal Harbour. Sam to Boca Raton.
For another twenty years, they lived again in the same state, often shopping at some of the same stores.
Neither one knew.
After the gala in 2022, Jack and Sam started visiting each other every week. They began speaking together at local high schools — two 97-year-old men with the same memories of the same shovels and the same coal.
In late 2023, a filmmaker named Jordan Matthew Horowitz finished a twenty-minute documentary about them. He called it Jack and Sam.
It was shortlisted for Oscar consideration.
Sam Ron died on October 11, 2023, at the age of 99.
He had had eighteen months with his old friend.
Jack Waksal is still alive, in his hundreds, in South Florida. He still speaks at high schools. He puts it simply:
This is why I survived. To tell this story.
