He was only 12 when he lost most of his relatives. After liberation, he came to New York and put his extraordinary proclivity for languages to work.

Ira Goetz has lost much of his sight. “I can see people,” he said. “But only shapes and colors. I can’t recognize the faces.” Keeping his remaining vision requires getting regular injections in his eye.

His hearing is almost gone too. For Mr. Goetz, a conversation is possible only with those who speak in a loud, deliberate voice, directly into his left ear, where he can still pick up sounds through a hearing aid.

Even with these challenges, Mr. Goetz, who turns 98 in December, still lives in his own apartment.

“My friends all died out,” he said. “I’m the one left.”

Mr. Goetz can see the Columbia University campus, where he once taught, from his apartment window.

In many ways, Mr. Goetz has been a survivor since age 12. That’s when everyone in his immediate family was killed by German soldiers in the town of Biecz, Poland.

Mr. Goetz, the oldest boy in the family, recalled his mother telling him to run. “The town was being liquidated,” he said, “we knew the Germans were killing off everybody. I was the only one who managed to get away.”

He ran into the countryside and slept in caves. “I didn’t eat for three or four days.”

Mr. Goetz managed to connect with an uncle and a few cousins but, eventually, all of them, including Ira, were put into concentration camps.

Mr. Goetz has only a few photos from his childhood. On the left, he is pictured (at bottom right) with extended family. The center image shows Mr. Goetz, left, with his immediate family members, all of whom were killed by German soldiers. The image on the right shows Mr. Goetz teaching several years after he arrived in New York.

Mr. Goetz said his ability to quickly master German was an important part of why he survived. He was able to communicate with soldiers and they assigned him a job, giving him a key so he could open and close a secured bathroom for them.

After liberation, Mr. Goetz moved to New York. “I had an aunt and an uncle here,” he said. “They took me to James Monroe High School to register. I had no idea what high school was. I had no idea about English.”

He found good teachers, put his proclivity for languages to work, and earned his high school diploma in less than two years. He went on to attend college and graduate school, eventually earning a master’s degree in foreign languages from Columbia University.

Though he is retired, Mr. Goetz still maintains a desk and work space.

His first years on his own in Manhattan were marked by frequent moves, bouncing from one apartment to another. When he landed a job teaching at Columbia University, he wanted to find a place nearby but as is often the case in New York, there was nothing fast or easy about Mr. Goetz’s apartment search. “I couldn’t find anything anywhere,” he said. “Or they were too expensive.”

Mr. Goetz’s library includes several academic texts on languages, as well as books about Biecz, his hometown in Poland.

One day, after driving around looking for apartments — again, in vain — he wound up parked on Riverside Drive, slumped behind the wheel of his car, exhausted. He looked up at the brick building across the street.

“I don’t know why but I just went in,” he said.

Mr. Goetz saw a man inside the lobby and asked if he was the super. The man, however, didn’t respond.

Mr. Goetz, who moved into his building in 1966, has been in his current unit since the 1970s.

“He didn’t quite understand,” Mr. Goetz recalled. “And then — I still can’t believe it — I asked him the same question in Polish and he said, ‘Yes.’”

They talked for a while and, eventually, Mr. Goetz asked if any apartments were available in the building. Later that day he signed a lease for a one-bedroom unit. It cost him $80 a month. “I felt very lucky that I went to a Polish guy who gave me an apartment.”

Mr. Goetz still has the original, yellowed lease he signed in May 1966. Over the last 60 years what he pays for his rent-stabilized apartment has increased to $1,500, and he has made two moves between units on different floors, each time chasing more space as well as windows with better light and stronger breezes coming over the Hudson River. The same building, however, has remained his home.

Despite his advanced age, Mr. Goetz still completes most daily tasks on his own, including getting dressed and ready for each day.

It has anchored his life across a marriage, another long-term relationship and a distinguished career in languages. In addition to teaching at Columbia University and other higher-education institutions, he also served as the director of the New York Association for New Americans, where he developed new models for teaching English to immigrants.

He’s been in his current apartment since the 1970s — he can’t recall the exact year — and half a century later the primary reason he is still able to live under his own roof is because of the help he gets from a grass-roots organization called Lifeforce in Later Years.

Known as LILY, the organization is based on the Upper West Side and focused on helping older individuals like Mr. Goetz who can, by and large, still live independently but might need a little help to get through the day.

Azieb Ghebre, 67, a longtime volunteer for LILY, spends time nearly every day with Mr. Goetz, sharing breakfast with him and helping him get out for his walks. She even spent the night on his couch when he went to bed feeling unwell and she was nervous about leaving him alone.

Azieb Ghebre, a volunteer with LILY, spends time nearly every day with Mr. Goetz. She takes him for walks in Riverside Park and, though she convinced him to get a cane, he rarely uses it.

Still, she says, in most areas of his life, Mr. Goetz is fiercely independent. “He won’t let me touch his clothes,” she said, laughing. “He washes them, takes care of them — he insists.”

LILY doesn’t ever charge for the services its volunteers provide. “We have no overhead, no office,” said Jonathon Slon, the community outreach coordinator for LILY, which serves people between 106th street and 145th street. Many of the organization’s volunteers are students, and some are foreign students who have a desire to connect with more people in this country and often can’t afford to fly home when school is not in session.

“We go around to people and see them and hang out with them for hours,” Mr. Slon said.

The organization provides volunteers to help complete tasks and make a day feel less lonely. That means getting people to doctors’ appointments and lunches, museums and Broadway plays. “Sometimes we go to jazz shows,” Mr. Slon said.

Jonathan Slon lives around the corner from Mr. Goetz and often helps with doctors appointments and daily logistics.

“We also have a Zoom movie group because some people aren’t ambulatory but they can all get on Zoom.”

In 2022, Mr. Slon started a weekly lunch in his apartment for a group of men, mostly in their 80s and 90s. “There are a few young ones in their 70s,” he said. “It’s pretty lively and freewheeling.”

Mr. Slon, 72, lives around the corner from Mr. Goetz and invited him to one of the lunches in 2024. It didn’t quite work out.

“Afterward, I walked Ira home,” he recalled. “He said he couldn’t hear what the men were saying, they talked too fast. And that’s when Ira taught me to speak slowly and separate each word so they don’t run together.”

The one-on-one conversations in his apartment with patient neighbors like Mr. Slon suit Mr. Goetz best. It’s the kind of individualized response that defines LILY. “We try to keep people feeling like they’re in control of their lives,” Mr. Slon said, “and that they haven’t lost all of their dignity.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5897771&forum_id=2Elisa#50096128)