Those who say there's no such thing as destiny need to meet Jack Waksal and Sam Ron, victims who met during the Holocaust, and who met again 79 years later in South Florida.

Having endured slave labor shoulder to shoulder in the Pionki Labor Camp in Poland, the two were separated after Waksal escaped into the forest, and Ron was moved to a different camp that was ultimately liberated.

Neither knew the other had survived, until Waksal attended a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's South Florida Dinner last Sunday, and found his old camp comrade to be the guest speaker. Introduced by his former name of Shmuel Rakowski, Waksal felt as if he was seeing a fraternal brother.

"He jumped off the seat and came running over to my seat and says you're my brother, I was very emotional, I'm normally not a very emotional guy," Ron explained, according to NBC Miami.

Just teenagers at the time of their imprisonment, the two managed to both immigrate to the United States, specifically to Ohio, where they both lived for 40 years unaware of each other's existence before eventually moving to South Florida.

"We were pushing coal to the oven to make heat to make power, and Jack said he worked at the same place!" Ron said of their time in the camp, according to CBS. "Hard work, bad conditions, cold, hunger, hundreds of people died. It wasn't uncommon to wake up in the morning and find the person next to you cold."

Despite living 40 miles apart, the two men are determined to keep the survivor's flames burning, and fill in the massive gap of years with life stories. Ron occasionally makes appearances at schools to teach young people about his experiences.

"I try to teach them not to hate, and to have a lot of hope and believe in yourself, this is what I did, this is how I survived because I believe in myself," Ron said.

Ari Odzer, reporting for NBC, says succinctly of the pair, that they revenged themselves against Adolf Hitler: by living long successful lives and having children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

(WATCH the NBC Miami video for this story below.)

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