Holocaust survivor Harry Nagelstein survived three concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

In the final instalment of a threepart series, he tells Owen Amos of his final days as a prisoner – and a million-to-one chance reunion.

INTERVENTIONISM – dirty word now, isn’t it? It drips with imperialism, reeks of racial superiority. Iraq, our last intervention, is hardly a gleaming, glorious case study. What others do is their business, we say. Intervening is immoral, we’re told. Best to shut the door, close the curtains and sit tight.

Harry may not agree. Without intervention – American, no less – he wouldn’t be here. In fact, if they’d arrived 14 days later, he wouldn’t be here. After two hours telling tales of shootings and starvation, Harry’s eyes gleam when he explains how Ebensee, his final concentration camp, was liberated.

“When the Americans arrived at the gates, we were so happy,” he says, the tempo rising, the words racing out. “When they came, they looked massive. They were two black men. We ran to the gates, lifting the Americans up. I couldn’t – I couldn’t stand on my own feet – but others did. Every time I stood up, I fell down. If they’d come two weeks later, I wouldn’t have survived.”

Many, high on freedom, ran to restaurants to feast. Some died, their battered bodies, stuck in survival mode, drowning in the wave of rich food. Harry – luckily – was unable to run. He was nursed to health by the Red Cross. When he felt better, he did what came naturally – he worked. His bricklaying skills, after all, had saved him in three concentration camps.

“The Americans had officers with Polish families, who spoke my language,” says Harry.

“I asked them ‘Got any work?’ The first thing they said was ‘Get those damn clothes off you!’ I didn’t have any others, apart from my camp uniform, so they gave me a US army uniform.

I peeled potatoes for them, washed up. I asked if I could come with them when they left, but they said it was impossible. They gave a me a pass, which allowed me on a train to the displaced persons’ camp in Ancona, Italy.”

Returning to Poland – where his family were killed, his town destroyed and 90 per cent of Jews exterminated – was not an option. “I couldn’t go back to Poland,” he says. “My house had been smashed, my family were gone.”

In Ancona, he joined the British Eighth Army – as many exiles from Nazi Europe did – but, after training and brief deployments in Italy, the war finished. However, Harry’s brief service allowed him to settle in England. He arrived in Pickering, North Yorkshire, before moving to Newcastle. After years in concentration camps, Nazi guns aimed at his head, Newcastle was nirvana.

“We were free,” says Harry, smiling. “We went to town every night. We used to go to the dance hall, dance with English girls.”

After being de-mobbed, he found work as a builder. One of those English girls, Cecilia, became his wife. They have four children and nine grandchildren. None would be here if the Americans had arrived two weeks later.

HARRY left his sister, Manya, in 1942. In their hometown, Hrubieszow, the two hid from Nazis in a hollow haystack, and buried Jewish bodies, to avoid German bullets.

But, eventually, the Nazis took them to concentration camps. Harry and his sister were placed in different queues. They were separated.

He last saw his sister in a queue for a concentration camp, crying as Nazis took her brother away.

After the war, he searched for her. He wrote to embassies, to the Red Cross, to distant cousins in Palestine. He didn’t find her. He presumed she, like three million other Polish Jews, had been killed. “I was free,” says Harry, “but I was still sad. My family had gone.” Then, on January 25, 1982, the phone rang.

“Cecilia was in the kitchen, preparing dinner and I was upstairs getting washed,” says Harry, in detail that suggests he’s replayed this day over and over. “The phone rang and I heard her say something like ‘Who are you?’ Then “He’s here, will you talk to him?’ “I came to the phone, he said my name, and I said ‘Yes, how did you know?’ He said I should sit down. He said ‘I’m your nephew. I’m your sister’s son. She survived. She’s alive’. I just collapsed, crying. I couldn’t talk any more.”

His nephew, Mike, was calling from Washington DC. His father was Meyer, the boyfriend who Manya would not leave when it was time to hide, back in 1942. Some teenage crush.

During the war, they promised to meet if they survived. They did and began a new life in the US. Mike, inspired by his parents’ love, wrote a book, still available on Amazon: Until We Meet Again. He found Harry during his research.

After speaking to Mike, Harry phoned his sister, last seen crying, 40 years ago, in Nazi-torn Poland. “I said ‘Are you alive?’” says Harry.

“She was crying, I was crying. The following day, we spoke again and we really talked, about family, about everything. Thank God we found each other, even 39 years on.”

Within a week, Manya arrived in Newcastle.

She was greeted on the airport runway by the world’s media and the brother she last saw almost four decades ago. How was the reunion?

Harry’s eyes, for the first time, get wet. He puts his hands on his head and says, simply: “You can’t imagine. You just can’t imagine.”

Manya recently died in the US. Meyer lives on. And so does Harry, still fit, still feisty, still carrying Nazi ink on his left arm. When, as a teenager, he was forced to throw neighbours’ bodies into mass graves, Harry told himself to survive, so the world could hear his story.

He did survive. The world should hear his story.