Holocaust survivor was 4 minutes late to Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue. That likely saved his life.

Judah Samet, 80, knew virtually all of the 11 people murdered Saturday morning at his Pittsburgh synagogue, Tree of Life, and had known most of them for years or decades. But because he was four minutes late arriving to 9:45 a.m. services on Saturday, he was not among the dead. When he pulled into a handicapped spot at 9:49, "somebody knocked on my window," Samet told Forward on Sunday. "There was this guy. Very calm and respectful. [He] told me, you better back up, there is an active shooting going on in your synagogue."

"It took Samet 60 seconds to process what the man was saying," Forward reports. "Samet was born in Hungary. He turned 8 years old at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. He spent five and a half years in an orphanage in Israel. He has been a member of Tree of Life Congregation for 55 years." He watched a police officer about four feet away from him exchange fire with the suspected murderer, Robert Bowers. "My God, my story doesn't end," he told Forward.

One of the victims, Rose Mallinger, and her daughter "sit behind me," Samet said. "If I was inside the synagogue, I would be in the line of fire." But "more than anything on Sunday, Samet seemed to be going back in his mind to the 1940s, when the Nazis tortured and murdered his family," Forward recounts. "The Nazis put Samet's family on a train to Auschwitz, but Slovakian partisans blew up the railroad line." His father died of typhoid shortly after World War II. You can read more about Samet's story and some of his friends who did not survive on Saturday at Forward.

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