Two brothers who came to the United States after surviving the Holocaust have died within weeks of each other at the same hospital, one from the coronavirus, the Associated Press reports.
Alexander, 95, and Joseph Feingold, 97, were born in Poland about eighteen months apart. They were from a Jewish family, and were separated during World War II. Alex, as he was known, and his mother, Ruchele, and his youngest brother, Henryk, were forced into a ghetto. Ruchele and Henryk, who was 13 at the time, were both sent to the death camp Treblinka, while Alex was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau before being forced to march to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where he was eventually liberated.
Joe and his father, Aron, fled to the Soviet-controlled region of Poland but ended up being arrested and imprisoned in separate labor camps in Siberia. They eventually reunited and returned to Poland after the war ended, where Joe narrowly became the only known survivor of what was the worst postwar attack on Jews in Poland.
He wrote in a memoir: “The feelings of guilt that I have, which I cannot overcome, are still with me. Alex never reproached me for being abandoned by his father, or by his older brother, or for anything else that he had to live through and survive. He didn't reproach me, but he didn’t have to.”
Joe was later featured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary, “Joe’s Violin,” which followed his donation of a violin to an all-girls’ school in the Bronx.
Alex died from pneumonia on March 17 at Mt. Sinai West Hospital. He tested negative for the coronavirus, which doctors had assumed he had. Joe died from the coronavirus less than a month later at the same hospital, on April 15. His stepdaughter, Gilbert, told AP that she spoke to him on a video call shortly before he passed away.
“I am choosing to believe that he heard that I loved him. I went through the list of all of those who loved him,” she said. “Hopefully, that gave him comfort.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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