The Atlanta World War II Round Table monthly meeting on February 18, 2023, held at Dunwoody United Methodist Church featured speaker WW2 veteran Hilbert Margol. Mr. Margol told me about the meeting about a month ago and invited me to attend. About 151 people came to the meeting. I was honored to be there, to meet Mr. Margol in person and other WWII veterans as well as survivors of the Holocaust.
Howard Margol on the left and Hilbert Margol, right on a snowy day following the end of World War II. The monastery in Salzburg, Austria in the background of the photograph was their temporary home at the time.
I first learned of Hilbert Margol during the pandemic. I attended a zoom presentation where he shared the story of himself and his twin brother Howard during WW2. The twin brothers, part of the 42nd Infantry, are Dachau liberators. Jan Slimming arranged for me to attend the presentation to the Atlanta Chapter of the Churchill Society. You can read this history on the Appen Media/Dunwoody Crier website here. It is also available in a Past Tense GA blog post from 2021.
Hilbert Margol spoke at the February 18, 2023 Atlanta World War II Round Table meeting. Mr. Margol’s 99th birthday was coming up in a few days, so at the end of the meeting the audience, which included several of his family members, sang Happy Birthday.
Howard Margol died in 2017, but his brother continues to share the experiences they had together during the war, as well as Howard’s experiences during the time they were apart. The focus of the February 18, 2023 presentation was Howard’s experience helping move a convoy of Jewish prisoners from Ebensee to Bad Gastein. The former prisoners had been denied the ability to practice and observe their own faith for years, so as the sun went down on a Friday evening they insisted on stopping on the side of the road to observe the sabbath.
Prior to the meeting, Mr. Margol shared the details of this history with me and it is also available on the Appen Media/Dunwoody Crier page. The article is titled Observing the Sabbath on the road to Bad Gastein 1945.
Hilbert Margol was introduced by Robert Ratonyi, a Holocaust survivor who was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1938. It was an honor to meet Mr. Ratonyi. In 1942, his father was conscripted into a Jewish labor battalion. Ratonyi’s mother was sent to a Austrian concentration camp in 1944. Ratonyi, who immigrated to Canada and then the U.S. has documented his life’s journey in a book titled, “From Darkness into Light, My Journey Through Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to Freedom.”
Thank you to Hilbert Margol and to Atlanta WWII Roundtable President Pete Mecca for inviting me and welcoming me to the meeting.
The Witness to War organization, whose mission is to preserve the oral history of combat veterans, was there to video Mr. Margol. Several videos of Hilbert Margol and one of Howard Margol are available on the website here.