A story of a Holocaust survivor, on how she met her husband.

So, the other week I found out that a client I work with is a Holocaust survivor.

She's short and in her 90s and I'd known her a bit from different shifts, and she mentioned something about her (Hungarian) husband's past at one point when we were chit-chatting, and so I asked her how they met.

"I was in the Holocaust," she began, "And I lost all my family."

And, that's how the story started.

After she got out of the concentration camp, she didn't know what to do, she was all alone, but she knew of some distant relatives in Budapest, and so she wrote them, telling them what happened, and that she didn't have anyone.

Her husband knew them and heard of her through them, and he had lost all of his family, too.

"I would like to write that girl," he said, and so he got permission from her relatives and her address and they began writing, and they wrote and they wrote and they wrote and they wrote and shared everything with one another, and they "truly understood one other," and at one point he shared a photograph, and he proposed marriage and she accepted, and then he went to meet her in Paris, where she had ended up on her way to the United States.

"So where did you meet him for the first time?", I was like.

"At the train station," she was like.

"But how did you find each other?", I was like.

"We wrote and agreed to wear something and the other knew," she was like.  "I had a dress and I wrote him, and that day I put on that dress.  He wrote me, he will wear a dark grey coat, and a carnation."

Then, she was like, "That day, I saw a man in a dark grey coat and a red carnation, and it was far, but he was so ugly.  I was upset, but I told myself, 'He is beautiful, and you can learn to love him.'  And I waved, and he waved, and I came closer, and he was so ugly...

"Then, out from behind him stepped another man, in a dark grey coat and a carnation, and it was [her husband's name], and that is the first time I saw him."

Then, her husband said they would go to the visa office, and they talked to the officials and he got her an extension, and they stayed in Paris for two weeks "and that was our honeymoon."

Through a Jewish charity group, they stayed in an awful boarding house and had one meal a day, "and we were as poor as church mice, and so happy," she said.