By Thomas Burrows1:10 PM Tuesday Feb 14, 2017
Hungarian Jew who survived Auschwitz and the Scottish soldier who helped save her will mark their 71st Valentine’s Day together tomorrow.
John Mackay, 96, was in the ranks of a commando team that liberated a number of Jewish prisoners from their Nazi guards in Poland.
The prisoners, who were held in Auschwitz at the time when ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele was conducting his evil experiments, were being marched to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany to face summary execution in the death throes of the Third Reich.
Hidden in the mass of prisoners was 20-year-old Hungarian Jew Edith Steiner, alongside her mother – the only two members of their family not sent to the gas chambers.After they were saved Edith – known to friends as Eci – caught 23-year-old Mr Mackay’s eye at a village hall dance to celebrate their liberation.
Mr Mackay, whose own wartime exploits in the London Scottish 1st Battalion included escaping from an Italian POW camp dressed as an enemy soldier, spotted Miss Steiner at the dance but was too shy to approach her.
He sent a friend over to ask if she would dance with him, but Miss Steiner insisted she would only dance with him if he plucked up the courage himself.
He did, and what followed was a whirlwind romance that saw her and her mother whisked back to Mr Mackay’s native Scotland.
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