They met for the first time 66 years ago in a hell on earth called Buchenwald.
Rick Carrier was a U.S. Army corporal, utterly stunned by the sight of so many living skeletons crammed inside the barracks of the Nazi death camp.
Irving Roth was one of those skeletons, a starving 16-year-old Jewish prisoner from Czechoslovakia.
But Roth’s strongest memory of that fateful day is not of Carrier but of the African-American soldier who stepped into his barrack and handed out chocolate.
“I had never seen a black person before,” Roth said. “I tell people you may not know what the Messiah looks like, but I do. One is black and one is white.”
Roth was recently reunited with the white soldier, Carrier, thanks to a Holocaust awareness group called the March of the Living. They plan to reunite dozens of other survivors and liberators and bring them back this April to the spot where their paths first crossed.
“I smiled when I saw Irving again,” said Carrier, 86, of Manhattan. “He came over and he hugged me. He said, ‘I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.’”
“It was like the Twilight Zone,” added Roth, who is 82 and lives on Long Island. “I was looking at someone who gave me a new life. He wore his old dress uniform for the meeting. But when I looked at him, I saw him in fatigues holding a gun.”
As for the kind black soldier, he is lost to history.
“I remember there were black soldiers there,” said Carrier. “But it was a long time ago.”
Roth and his brother Bondi were hiding in Hungary when they were captured in the waning months of World War II and shipped first to Auschwitz. With the Russians closing in, the Nazis shut down that death camp and marched the prisoners into Germany to Buchenwald.
“My brother and I were separated there,” said Roth. “I never saw him again.”
While Roth struggled to survive, Carrier was with General George Patton marching through France, Belgium and Germany.
“I was looking for a supply dump and I found Buchenwald instead,” said Carrier.
It was April 10, 1945. The Nazi guards had melted away, leaving behind hundreds of dying Jews, Poles and Russians.
“You see a lot of stuff in war,” Carrier said. “But I never saw anything like this, people starving behind barbed wires, dressed in these flimsy striped pajamas.”
Carrier said he radioed his commanding officer and then walked over to the barbed wire fence.
“I thought to myself, ‘God damn, God damn,’” he said. “I whipped out my cutting wires and cut it open. They were standing there and looking like they couldn’t believe it.”
Roth said it wasn’t until the next day, around 3 p.m., that he met his liberators.
“I was five foot eight and weighed 75 pounds,” he said. “I was in the barrack when two soldiers walked in, battle- hardened soldiers, looking at these skeletons. They broke down.”
After the war, Carrier studied art in Paris before heading home to Pennsylvania where he married and had two kids. He later moved to New York and worked in the movie business for Howard Hughes. “I had a wild time,” he said.
Carrier still lives in Chelsea with a longtime girlfriend and is a grandfather of two.
Roth returned to his hometown but didn’t stay long. By 1947 he was in New York. He served with the U.S. Army in Korea, married and had two children and four grandchildren.
“It was important that I meet Rick Carrier again,” Roth said. “He brought me back to life.”
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