PEQUANNOCK / NewJersey.com / Morris County News / April 10, 2011
By Mike Frassinelli / The Star-Ledger
At Cedar Crest Village, a retirement community disguised as a college campus, the stories echo throughout the 130 acres.
If there are two things a senior citizen has plenty of, it’s pills and stories.
The woman bowling a 215 on the Wii video game has a story, as do the residents singing along to the piano accompaniment of old-time ditties.
Inside these walls are stories of contentment, and of missed opportunities. Of friendships made, and love that got away.
There are stories behind the creases in each face, and the limp in each gait.
Leopold Lowy, a spry 82-year-old native of Czechoslovakia who moved to Cedar Crest at the end of last year with his wife, was in a memoir-writing class two months ago when he noticed a familiar accent. He asked Pavel Graf Loewner, a 3½-year resident of the retirement community in Pompton Plains, which languages he spoke. Czech, English and Slovak, he was told.
Paul Graf Loewner (left) and Leopold Lowy, both residents at Cedar Crest Village, shared similar WWII experiences while being held at the Buchenwald forced labor camp in Weimar in Nazi Germany. (Jerry McCrea/The Star-Ledger)
Lowy asked Loewner, a fellow Czech Jew, where he was during "the war." No qualifier was needed that he was talking about World War II.
"I went to concentration camp, and I finished in Buchenwald," said Loewner, who was liberated by Americans in April 1945.
Suddenly, a continent away and more than 6½ decades later, two survivors of the same notorious Nazi concentration camp found themselves together at the same New Jersey retirement community.
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