Leon Gersten is a 79 year-old holocaust survivor. Before his village in Poland was liberated by the Soviet army, Gersten managed to survive thanks only to one man – Czeslaw Polziec.

Like the movie about Czech industrialist, Oskar Schindler who saved 1,200 Jews from Nazi extermination camps, Polziec secretly sheltered Gersten in rural Poland for just over two years.

Now, 70 years later, Gersten finally gets to meet the man who saved his life. The 79 year old tried to imagine what it might be like to meet his very own, real-life Schindler:

I think it will be a physical reaction.

When the pair met, they embraced. And embraced again. “Hi, hi, hi,” Polziec said, his broken English limited to just a few words.

But no words could truly capture the gratitude that Gersten must have felt for the man who proved to him that, in a world fueled by hatred and violence, kindness still existed. “I am alive because of them,” Gersten said of Polziec and his family. “They are heroes.”

Gersten had waited a long time for the day that he could meet Polziec, and show him his family – a testament to the enormity of Polziec’s life-saving gesture.  As a young child, Leon Gersten spent two years with his mother and other family members in the attic of Polziec’s barn.

The two men met on the day that Thanksgiving and Hanukkah merge, in an eclectic celebration of human gratitude.

On Thanksgiving, the two men sat down for a formal dinner and on Sunday, several generations of Gersten’s family, including a granddaughter will travel from Israel, and share a meal with Polziec at a New York restaurant.

Without Polziec, none of the people in the photo below would be alive today.

[Source : CNN Blogs]