'You get more' at Acme, but Manya Frydman Perel certainly didn't expect an encounter with one of the men who helped her to freedom during WWII.Ý

Three weeks ago, Manya Frydman Perel and her husband Rafael were grocery shopping at an Acme supermarket near their Bustleton home, unaware of the impact that the routine excursion would have on their lives.

Perel, 76, and her husband selected the items they needed, paid the cashier and waited for their groceries to be bagged. That's when a worn and faded tattoo on the arm of the bagger caught Manya Perel's eye.

She asked him what the tattoo symbolized.

The supermarket employee told Perel that he had been a sailor with the United States Merchant Marine during World War II and the tattoo was that outfit's insignia.

That remark piqued her interest because Perel -- a native of Poland who had been imprisoned in numerous concentration camps during the war -- had come to North America aboard a Merchant Marine ship.

The next day, she returned to the Acme with a picture of the vessel she had traveled aboard.

That ship, the SS Marine Jumper, was the exact vessel that the supermarket employee -- Chester Vacca -- had sailed on during his years in the Merchant Marines.

In fact, Vacca was aboard the ship during the voyage that brought Perel to freedom.

And like that, sailor and refugee were reunited more than 50 years after the journey that would change Perel's life.

a reason to smile

Whether it was merely a chance meeting or something far deeper that made their paths converge, Perel and Vacca are just delighted that it happened.

When she and Vacca spoke, Perel said, "we had the same memories of the ship and how it came here."

For Vacca, it wasn't a typical day at the supermarket.

"I was amazed," he said of the encounter with Perel. "It just makes you feel good, knowing that you helped bring people to (America)."

But this wasn't the first time that Vacca met someone who sailed to freedom on his ship. A few years back, when he worked at a Lower Bucks County supermarket, Vacca met another woman who joined other refugees on the SS Marine Jumper.

During his tour of duty with the Merchant Marine, from 1944 to '48, the ship rescued two boatloads of concentration-camp refugees, he recalled.

One group was transported to New York City. The other was taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada).

Perel was among that group, which departed Germany in January 1948 and arrived in Canada eight days later.

The woman had endured seven years as a prisoner in concentration camps. Her family was rounded up in its native Radom, Poland, when the Nazis invaded the country in 1939.

Perel said her parents and five of her nine siblings -- four brothers and a sister -- were taken by train to a death camp, where they were suffocated by poisonous gas and cremated in an incinerator "simply because they were Jewish."

Perel's remaining brother previously had fled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, she said.

Perel and her other three sisters were separated and sent to different concentration camps, where they performed manual labor.

"I was all alone," she recalled. "Each of my sisters was sent to different camps . . . they kept us for slave labor."

taken from camp to camp

First, Perel was sent to a camp in Ploshow, Poland, and toiled in a hardware factory. Her odyssey would take her to eight camps between 1939 and '45, including a stay at the infamous Auschwitz camp in Poland.

Later, she was transferred to a camp in Germany. It was there that Perel had perhaps her most harrowing experience as a camp prisoner.

Perel claims that Dr. Josef Mengele -- the notorious physician who conducted diabolical medical experiments on camp inmates and is said to have been responsible for thousands of deaths -- included her among victims targeted for experimentation.

Perel said she slipped away by hiding in the prisoners' barracks.

"It was hell on earth," Perel said of her experiences during the Holocaust. "Nothing can explain the suffering."

As the war drew to its end, said Perel, she and other camp inmates were herded by the Nazi army away from advancing Russian troops who had come to liberate the prisoners.

"The German army took us to several different camps because they didn't want us to be liberated," she explained.

During this nomadic period, Nazi soldiers forced inmates to participate in the death-march line, during which anyone who faltered was killed.

Exhausted and starving, and unable to walk much farther, Perel fled into the German woods in June 1945, hoping to avoid death at the hands of her captors.

"I couldn't walk any longer, so I escaped into the forest," she said.

Perel apparently picked the right time to make her break. Russian troops began the invasion of Nazi strongholds the next day.

"For three days and three nights, all I heard was bombs falling and guns shooting . . . then the Russian army came and liberated me," she explained.

And not a moment too soon, she added.

"If the war would have lasted another two weeks, I wouldn't be sitting here," she said. "If I didn't die from a bullet, it would have been malnutrition. I survived by a miracle."

a happy reunion

In July 1945, Perel and other camp survivors were taken to a displaced-persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany.

It was at the camp that Perel was reunited with her other sisters, who had survived the war. She used her time in the camp to recuperate, while waiting for her turn to travel to North America.

Perel contacted relatives who were living in Montreal, Canada. In January 1948, her number was called to journey to America aboard Vacca's ship -- the Marine Jumper.

Vacca, 72, who lives with his wife in Bustleton, joined the Merchant Marine in 1944, shortly after the Juniata Park native turned 16 in April of that year.

"I saw in ad in the paper and wanted to get in the service. I tried to join the Army, Navy and Marines, but they all told me, 'Go home and grow up,'" he recalled.

With few other options, Vacca joined the Merchant Marine so he could serve his country during the war.

At that time, the Merchant Marine, a paramilitary group, was responsible for transporting supplies, infantry equipment and such war vehicles as tanks to troops at the front of the action.

That's not to say the life of a Merchant Marine was without peril.

"We faced air attacks from Japanese aircraft four or five times," Vacca recalled of his stint on the high seas.

When the war ended in 1945, the Merchant Marine was charged with delivering food supplies to soldiers and rescuing displaced people.

At a recent reunion attended by a Times reporter, Perel credited Vacca with saving her life.

"He is such a nice man, and a good person," she said. "He helped to take us to freedom, so we can live in a free country."

Vacca declined taking full credit for Perel's rescue.

"Remember," he said, "I was just one man on the crew."