All Ben Sieradzki wanted was a photograph.
He got the photographer. He also got a friend.
Sieradzki, 78, a retired Berkeley mechanical engineer, spent most of his life not talking about his past. About the work camp. About withering away to 80 pounds. About watching his crippled mother hauled off in the Lodz Ghetto, “dragged into the truck by her collar, like a rag.”
A decade ago, Sieradzki broke his self-imposed silence, and sent a letter to the 84th Infantry’s newsletter, seeking the “tall, good-looking blond man” who took photographs of him and his fellow inmates at the Ahlem labor camp, an hour’s walk from Hanover, Germany.
Sieradzki found his tall blond soldier — Vernon Tott, a former meat-packing supervisor and amateur photographer from Souix City, Iowa. Over the past decade the two became friends. They even shared a bittersweet laugh over the coincidence that Sieradzki had installed an automated system at a rival meat-packing plant, which put Tott’s factory out of business.
Tott was soon inspired to track down many of the other Ahlem survivors he caught in his haunting photographs, and he found at least 27 of them.
The story caught the attention of the media worldwide and locally, too; j. ran a profile of Sieradzki in 2003. And, in the past two years, his unlikely reunion with Tott brought him to places he thought he’d never go — again.
Over the summer, Sieradzki, who was born and raised in Zgierz, a 15-minute tram ride from Lodz, was invited back to his hometown by the Polish government to mark the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of the ghetto.
It was the first time he had returned to Poland since his teen years. And, in all likelihood, it will be the last.
“The city of Lodz was a pretty dismal place. The main street was very modern; it had Ikea and all the big-box stores from America and Europe. But if you go where the ghetto was, and the other streets where Jews used to live before the war, there was graffiti, a lot of it,” said Sieradzki, a spry and lucid man with a round, kindly face and soft blue eyes.
He brandishes a snapshot of a filthy building with crumbling plaster and exposed masonry peeking through. More notable, however, is the Polish text spray-painted across the wall mentioning the “blood of the Jews.”
Polish officials assured him this wasn’t meant to be anti-Semitic, but “it was two soccer teams hating each other by saying, ‘You are like a bloody Jew.'”
Sieradzki is not so reassured.
He has also been invited to Germany twice in the past two years, has crisscrossed America for various Holocaust memorial events, and, along with Tott, is one of the principal leads in “Angel of Ahlem,” a documentary being crafted by filmmakers at the University of Florida.
Sieradzki smiles and shows off a photo of himself and Tott in a beautiful, shaded glade with healthy, 60-year-old trees sprouting behind them. They are standing upon nearly the spot where they first met, when Tott was a strapping, 20-year-old GI and Sieradzki was a 17-year-old bedridden with half-a-dozen infectious diseases.
When the Americans rolled up to the work camp five miles out of Hanover, the bedraggled survivors weren’t sure what to make of them. What was that star on the trucks? Were they Russians? Had the Germans come back?
Then, two soldiers pulled out a pair of baseball gloves and began tossing around the ol’ horsehide. No one was ever happier to watch a baseball game.
The survivors flagged down the Americans, who were warned not to get too close, as the emaciated Jews were carrying just about every infectious disease in the medical dictionary.
“Which we were,” affirmed Sieradzki. But Tott and his fellow soldiers did empty all the cigarettes out of their pockets and soon provided the survivors with food, clothes and hospital care.
Of the thousand or more Jewish men who had worked alongside Sieradzki dynamiting boulders and building an underground factory, perhaps 30 or 40 were alive to be rescued by Tott and his comrades.
In the last decade, the “Angel of Ahlem” located several dozen of them.
On Tuesday, March 1, Sieradzki was awakened by a 5 a.m. phone call. He figured a call at that hour probably wouldn’t be good news, and he was right. Vernon Tott had died of cancer. He was 80.
“He was such a wonderful guy. He did so much. He went around to churches and he told the story of what he saw,” said Siradzki of his friend.
“I’m so sorry. A lot of people are.”
And all of Tott’s work late in life, the scores of survivors he touched, the boatloads of news articles about Tott and the Ahlem survivors (the press clippings take up three large boxes in Sieradzki’s closet) wouldn’t have happened if Ben Sieradzki hadn’t written a letter looking for a tall, blond photographer.
“He’s the hero. He tells me that I am the hero, being able to survive that horror, what he saw. But I don’t have big plans or intentions to make a fuss about it. I’m going to die, a lot of these older people are going to die and this comes from a survivor who is still alive and remembers the horrors. And it should be told,” he said.
Sieradzki’s distinctive moniker makes him easy to find in the phone book, and, following every news story, he gets calls, often from American soldiers who liberated the camps.
After a story in The New York Times last month, he was contacted by a 95-year-old former American civilian administrator who, in essence, ran Hanover following Germany’s surrender.
The older man told Sieradzki he still has nightmares about the mass graves he ordered dug and watched fill.
Sieradzki flips on his DVD player. The filmmakers haven’t completed their documentary, but they have provided Sieradzki with footage of himself and Tott walking, arm in arm, through the overgrown ruins of Ahlem.
“That’s a horrible way we met, Ben,” says Tott on the screen, “But now we’re good friends.”
Sieradzki smiles.
“All I did was write a letter,” he said.
“Can you imagine a stupid little letter would do so much?”