Couple faced death in German captivity

Sixty-five years ago, in the belly of Hitler's Third Reich, Major and Manya Kornblit virtually gave up hope of ever regaining their freedom.

All they cared about then were bread crumbs and living another day.

The Kornblits, then teenage sweethearts, were prisoners in Nazi Germany's death camps.

"Now I'm here,” said Manya, 82 and living in Ponca City. As her eyes glazed with tears, she added with a gentle smile, "If I'm still here talking to you, it's not because of one miracle, it's because of a thousand miracles.”

Manya and Major Kornblit's survival of the Holocaust is a testament to their own courage and the courage of millions who sacrificed their lives during World War II in the sacred honor of freedom.

Their story is one that swept them from the Jewish ghetto of Hrubieszow, Poland, and into hiding like animals, and then through the hell of a combined 13 Nazi concentration camps.

Today, they stand proud as the benefactors of the American Dream and keepers of the Holocaust story.

Yet their journey came at a horrific cost.

"We didn't just lose our families,” stressed Major, now 82. "We lost entire families — mother, father, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins. ...

"Memorial Day to us is everything. People risked their lives to save us.”

In return, the Kornblits willingly subject themselves to reliving the nightmares of the past. They tell of what they witnessed for those who no longer can.

Some details admittedly have grown blurrier through the years, while others remain vivid and haunting.

"Who kept track of things like that back then?” Manya often mused when asked about years and dates and much smaller details. "We were just trying to stay alive.”

What will likely never stray from the memory of the Kornblits is the first time they avoided death at the hands of the Gestapo. A police chief in their hometown, a highway commissioner and a farmer risked execution by hiding the young lovers in a three-story haystack, which sat atop a hand-dug crater.

Aside from Manya and Major, the handful of people included Manya's younger brother, Chaim. He was told he could go along if he vowed to remain quiet.

For weeks, they hid within the darkness of the haystack and ventured out only late at night.

The stakes became painfully evident one day when they heard a long, intense chain of gunfire from their hiding place. They would later learn that the Germans had ordered townspeople to line up next to freshly dug pits.

The townspeople then were executed and rolled into their waiting graves.

"All I was told was that my parents had been killed,” Manya said solemnly.

Eventually, hunger and the Germans' need for labor lured Manya, Major and Chaim from their hiding place. Then one day, a Gestapo squad rolled into their Jewish ghetto.

Manya, Major and Chaim were scattered in different directions. Before being separated, Major told his sweetheart, "If we live through this, we will meet again back home.”

They spent the next 2 ½ years on the verge of death.

Sometime after May 1944, Manya was transported to the Auschwitz death camp, where an estimated 1.5 million prisoners either died from starvation or the gas chambers.

A faded blue tattoo on Manya's forearm is evidence of her life at the notorious camp. The tattoo was her serial number: A-21321.

"I remember hearing the screams from the people in the gas chambers,” said Manya, closing her eyes. "I can still hear them screaming.”

In retrospect, Manya credits her survival at the camp to one fortunate decision. The Nazis needed laborers in Czechlosvakia. Manya volunteered.

Manya's weight would plummet to 67 pounds by the time she was liberated by the Russian army.

Major, meanwhile, spent his final days of captivity in the German concentration camp of Dachau.

One day, the sound of heavy gunfire rocked the camp. Prisoners were marched into the woods by gun-toting guards, who then scattered.

The American forces had come to liberate them.

Major soon found himself living in American-occupied Munich, thinking everyone he had known and loved was dead. He was wrong.

A young man from his hometown mentioned that he had seen his girlfriend alive and living in a house in Poland. Major stood in disbelief.

He secured a passport from a government office in Munich.

Major found the house, and when the door opened his eyes locked on Manya.

"We just squeezed each other so hard,” Manya recalled. "We hugged for the longest time.”

The two were married a short time later.

Life eventually carried them to the United States, where in 1951 they were taken by train from New Orleans to Oklahoma City and finally to a job at a junkyard in Ponca City. The Kornblits had $20.

The Kornblits raised two children — Sam, 60, and Michael, 56.

In 1983, Michael co-authored a book about the Holocaust experience of his parents titled, "Until We Meet Again: A True Story of Love and War, Separation and Reunion.”

A year before its publication, Manya learned that her little brother, Chaim, also had survived the Holocaust.

They reunited after 40 years in a much-publicized media event at Chaim's new home in Britain.

Manya bear-hugged her brother and whispered, "We made it.”