I almost didn’t go to the little party on Sunday night. I was caught up editing a story that came in late, a soccer column that required close attention and lots of fact-checking and the insertion of accent symbols in Spanish and French names and, well, by the time I was finished it was an hour after the party had been scheduled to begin, at 9:30, and everyone who was going was already there.

But I had said I would go, so I felt as if I needed to show up, because as anyone who puts on even a modest event will tell you, it’s something of an annoyance when Person X says, “I will most surely come” and then doesn’t.

And now I’m very glad I did. Because I heard a remarkable story — well, remarkable history, not just a “story” — from one of the older guys who work as a temporary editor for the International Herald Tribune. One of those quietly riveting stories told with minimal fanfare that seems typical of those who have lived through real danger. And perhaps told only because someone prone to prying questions (that would be me) is prying.

My colleague’s astounding early life, beginning as a 7-year-old Jewish Pole living in Warsaw in 1939.

Those who know the IHT newsroom will know to whom I am referring. But I will not use his name because I didn’t ask his permission, and I have no idea if any of this is recorded elsewhere. It could be; it certainly is more interesting than the lives 99 percent of us have led.

There were about 10 of us at another colleague’s apartment, the same place (it turns out) that we had stayed at for two weeks on either side of Halloween, as I recall. I described it earlier: The small but cunningly designed serviced apartment with the big deck outside the sliding glass door. And it was on that deck that some of us gathered, after putting out the paper Sunday night. It was a nice gesture of the host to invite us over.

It was a quiet group representing a slightly older than average demographic of the newsroom. Nursing beers or sipping some wine, eating a few peanuts. We all were talking in normal tones of voice because thousands of neighborhood residents presumably were sleeping all up and down the street; Hong Kong is a remarkably early-to-bed place for a big city, and it was pushing midnight.

I found myself sitting in a chair next to this older colleague, one well-respected for his long years in the business and considered one of the most capable and versatile editors in the newsroom. Even in his, what it is now clear, late 70s.

I may have been talking about myself, which is always dull and never tells me anything new, or maybe we were talking about the weather, an equally dead-end conversation, when I said to My Colleague (as I will here-in-after refer to him), “So, where are you from, originally?”

And off he went. Matter-of-factly, with minimal embellishments, and seemingly ready to lay down his story at any point of its telling, had I not persisted in asking what happened next. (And I apologize right now if I make errors in the recounting of this, because I am doing it from memory, from three days ago.)

He lived in Warsaw, he said. With his parents. He didn’t say he was an only child, but I believe he was.

It was a family of Jews, and World War II was breaking out, and it was going to be a very bad time to be Polish and, especially, to be a Polish Jew.

He remembers Warsaw being bombed by the Nazis. He remembers fires raging, and a call for all able-bodied adult males to join the fighting. (His father was among them, but the Polish army collapsed before he got to the front.) He recalls his parents moving to another building, after the invasion began, because their actual home was close to the presidential residence, and they considered it more likely to be targeted for bombing.

Poland didn’t hold out long, not as it was attacked from the west by Germany and, soon after, from the east by the Soviet Union. He remembers German troops in Warsaw, but he doesn’t recall if they staged a victory parade of the sort that would come, less than a year later, down the Champs Elysees in Paris.

But the family did know it was incumbent on them to get out.  The adults did, certainly.

So far, the coming “world” war was limited, in terms of shooting, to this one country, Poland. And the family took advantage of that.

One of my colleague’s aunts was married to an Austrian Christian. He had been involved in the government or perhaps he was a military man; my colleague told me, but now I do not recall. But that was to prove a critical factor in their coming escape, this connection to the non-Jewish establishment.

My colleague’s aunt, through her Austrian husband, managed to get train tickets for the five of them — herself, my colleague, his parents and (I believe) the Austrian, though why he would need to come along now eludes me.

At any rate, they got onto what was actually a military train. Carrying troops or supplies or perhaps both. But heading out of Poland, which was key. And my colleague recalls an overnight trip that took them through Cracow and perhaps Budapest and over the Brenner Pass through the Alps. But it ended in Trieste, a port city at the end of the Adriatic Sea and part of Mussolini’s Italy, at that moment in history.

We can only imagine the tension of all the border crossings involved — though most of their route would have been through German-occupied territory. The request for papers. The examination of documents. The fear of being sent back or even detained. When you consider  all of that … it becomes even more harrowing.

Escaping Poland was key. It was to suffer the highest rate of civilian deaths of any country in the war, and most of the dying was still in the future. But in Trieste, as refugees, they were still anything but safe.

Luckily, Mussolini was at that point (late 1939) not quite at war with anyone that wasn’t Ethiopia (which the Italians had taken, with some difficulty, a few years earlier). After some time in Trieste, the little group managed to get down the Italian peninsula as far as Rome. And, perhaps still using the connections of the Austrian uncle, wangled seats on a tri-motor passenger airplane.

They flew first to Barcelona, and then to Madrid, and then to Lisbon. It must have been a marvelous adventure for a 7-year-old, to be on a plane in 1939/early 1940. And we can conjure a sense of the anxiety his parents must have felt, throughout.

Lisbon was a point of departure for many people in Europe who were trying to flee the disaster. You remember the particulars from the movie “Casablanca,” the famous Bogart movie? All the European refugees in Casablanca (Morocco) are trying to get out, to go to the New World, but there is just one plane a day to Lisbon, and it is almost impossible to get on.

Lisbon is in Portugal, which was a fascist dictatorship but a neutral fascist dictatorship. It was to become renown for spying and generic plotting throughout the war. But at this point, it has a 7-year-old and his parents in it, desperate to get out. Preferably for America.

I believe by this time some months had passed. Italy now was in the war, having declared against France (and by extension, Britain) late in the spring of 1940, when the Germans were over-running France and Mussolini jumped in to snatch away a piece of neighboring French territory and try to get a bit of reflected glory from the astonishing German success in France.

But, again, my colleague’s family was ahead of the times. By the summer of 1940, they were already in Lisbon — when a trip from Trieste to Rome to Lisbon would have been impossible, for civilians. They, however, were already there.

So, in 1941, I believe it was, they took a ship to the United States. Which was possible because the U.S. was not yet in the war (and wouldn’t be until the end of the year, after Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7). The family sailed on a commercial ship, a freighter, I take it. And it is not commonly known, but nearly all freighters have a few extra berths, and they will sell space in them for civilians willing to pay. There certainly would have been some danger from German submarines, but they were not headed to or from England, so that would have reduced the risk. But still …

So, a week or so later, my colleague was in New York City. He was perhaps 8 by then. Maybe 9? His parents were with him, and so was his aunt — and I forgot to ask about the uncle, who had gotten the escape started, back in Poland.

My colleague remembers his first day at school. He didn’t speak a word of English. “It was total immersion,” he said with a smile, using a modern education term not yet coined back in 1941.

When he grew up, he joined the U.S. Army, and when he was mustered out (and this must have been in the early 1950s), he decided to take a job at the Washington Post. “For a few years,” he said. And then he went on to work there for 40 years.

I asked about the fate of his relatives back in Poland, which was to become infamous for its death camps and concentration camps. He offered the caveat that his parents and aunt often didn’t give direct answers to his questions about World War II. That some of what happened wasn’t clear even to him, and he had lived it — albeit  as a child. He said he believes none of his immediate relatives died or were killed during the war. He said his grandmother was taken in by a Polish Christian family and safely hidden until the war was over.

And there it was. This remarkable story of a child who was caught up in the greatest conflagration of the past century, and who then escaped just ahead of its next eruptions to find haven in the New World.

And now that child was the 70-something man sitting on the deck of an apartment building in Hong Kong, quietly having a drink with a few other journalists on a mild winter night in south China.

(The only other conversation I have had with someone who lived through such monumental events was with the grandmother of my first girlfriend. The grandmother had been born in Austria-Hungary, which hasn’t existed since 1918, was married to a White (anti-communist) Russian and escaped to America by going across the length of Russia to Vladivostok, and taking ship there. I still remember my quasi-girlfriend being annoyed that I was plying the older woman with questions, but as it turns out she was the one and only person who lived under the Emperor Franz Josef — and got across revolutionary Russia, to boot — I ever was to meet.)

In recent years, my IHT colleague has been one of the mainstays of the “loaner” pool that the IHT often dips into. Five, six, seven guys, most of them retired from their “real” jobs who work three or four months at a time, mostly in Paris but sometimes in Hong Kong, too. And you begin to see how and why they so rarely get flustered. Not only do they have the wisdom and (usually) patience of age, they also probably have been through worse times (this colleague certainly has) than most of us can imagine.

He said he has been back. To Warsaw. And he visited the building that his family left, the one they abandoned because they thought it was too close to the president’s residence. And it is still standing. How it survived, he said, he had no idea.