Joe Engel died last week.
It’s unlikely you will know the name, especially if you don’t live in Charleston, S.C., his hometown since 1949.
Joe never wrote a great novel or made a scientific breakthrough.
His accomplishment was less gaudy, yet no less significant.
Joe lived to tell.
I met him in 2005 — the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II — on an assignment to write about an interfaith pilgrimage to Holocaust sites in Poland.
We visited murder factories whose names still bespeak the immensity of evil: Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek.
And Auschwitz, where Joe was sent in 1942 at the age of 14.
A little over a million people died there, but somehow he did not.
“Every morning,” he said, “you could see hundreds of skeletons. Not human beings, just skeletons. Bones. The only thing you saw was bones and a big nose. We used to pick ’em up, and they used to take ’em to the gas chambers.”