By Penny E. Schwartz
Laguna Woods Globe Correspondent
The first time Eddy Hoffman experienced Valentine’s Day was as a 16-year-old Czech orphan living on a communal farm in England after World War II.
“I was the only one to get 28 valentines,” he said with a sparkle in his eye. “The other guys didn’t get any.”
“That’s because he was a nice, sweet guy,” said Eveline Hoffman, his wife of 65 years.
The couple, residents of the Village for nearly two decades, are both Holocaust survivors who met on a blind date in Cleveland in 1955. They were members of an international students group that held dances and were set up by friends and relatives.
“He saw me and it was all over,” Eveline said with a smile. They were married two years later.
Their separate paths to Cleveland had been fraught with danger and death as both were swept up in Nazi Germany’s effort to annihilate the Jewish population of Europe.
In fact, the pair attribute the success of their long marriage partly to sharing similar backgrounds, especially their experiences during and after World War II.
Eddy, who will turn 94 in a couple of weeks, was taken by the Nazis from his home in Czechoslovakia when he was 14. His family was murdered and he ended up in Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. He was liberated from the camp at age 16 by the U.S. Army under Gen. George Patton.
Returning to his hometown in Czechoslovakia, he found an aunt and some cousins still alive. The mayor and police chief, who had been fellow Communists and friends of his father, gave him money and papers to go to college in Kiev, then a part of the Soviet Union.
“I didn’t like the whole system (of communism) and didn’t want to go to college,” Eddy said. “So by accident,” he said with a wink, “I went to Prague instead and lived in an orphanage there.”
When the Jewish Agency offered to send him to England, he asked himself, “What have I got to lose?” and accepted the offer, although he…
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