It's a radiant morning in New York City. I'm on my way to the United Nations building. Che Guevara is going to give a speech to the General Assembly today and I'm going to coach him.

My name is Alejandro Mario Fogel.
You would say that Alejandro is a very Spanish sounding name and Mario is so Italian.  But I was named after my 2 grandfathers: Avrum and Meir, a tailor and a butcher from Eastern Europe.  They were both born in the same year: 1888. They grew up in the Pale, a region where most of the Eastern European Jews lived at the time. Avrum and Meir lived close by, on each side of the Carpathian Mountains, until they were 17 years old. But they never met. Two of their children found each other many years later on the other side of the world.

Avrum left the Pale in 1905 when he was 17 years old escaping the Russian draft. Sofia, his wife, went with him. They landed in Buenos Aires at the Hotel de los Inmigrantes with a Samovar, a metal bed, a wall clock and their language: Yddish.
Meir instead, decided to stay in the Pale. While Avrum's family was secular, Meir family's was very religious, Hassidic, and didn't want to leave the region for fear that their children would stop practising judaism in a foreign land. On March 23, 1941, Meir and his wife Blime along with 8 of their 13 children were locked in a packed cattle train car and sent to Auschwitz where they were killed. My father Moishe, one of the 5 surviving kids, was able to escape. He was 17 years old and found himself homeless and on the run.
In his 12-year journey across Europe, Moishe was captured and sent to labor camp three times. He escaped through the tiny window of the train taking him to Auschwitz. He joined the Soviet army. He defected from the Soviet Army at the end of the war and crossed to the west. He lived as a displaced person wandering through Europe for 8 years. He made it to Buenos Aires and marry my mother Esther, Avrum's youngest daughter.

Moishe tried to immigrate to the United States at the end of the war, but the quota for Jewish Displaced Persons was very small. Of the millions of Jews seeking asylum only 80,000 were allowed to enter the US under that category by 1953. In July of that year, in Paris, Moishe obtained a fake Bolivian passport through the Bnei Brit, a Jewish Organization helping displaced people leave Europe. He landed in La Paz, Bolivia, and within a few days took a train to Argentina. Ernesto Guevara arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, by train, in July 1953. He stayed a few days and continued on his journey through Latin America and became El Che Guevara.
Moishe and Ernesto’s worlds were so far apart. The immigrant from Transylvania in search of a new life in Argentina and the immigrant from Argentina in search of a new life in Latin America. The young man carrying his knowledge of the Torah and Jewish mysticism, exhausted from persecution, war and poverty. The young man who just became a physician, going to war to end persecution and poverty.

(continues)