The story of Vladimir Fiser and Marika Ferber probably never would have been told had it not been for the way it ended.

The married couple in their 80s were found at the base of their Etobicoke apartment building just before 8 a.m. Tuesday, after seemingly deciding to jump to their deaths together to put an end to her chronic pain.

Friends told of a pair who bucked the odds and rode the waves of history to arrive at their nondescript apartment tower on the edge of Toronto.

Fiser and Ferber were both born in the small Croatian city of Osijek on the eve of World War II, said longtime friend and neighbour Mira Vlatkovic. They befriended each other as children in the small Jewish community, which was torn apart when the Nazis invaded.

They found each other again later, by then both married to others and living in Israel.

When their spouses died of cancer a day apart, she said, they turned their lifelong friendship into a second marriage.

They ended that marriage and their lives together this week, apparently without breathing a word of their plan to friends or neighbours.

Their suicide pact was spelled out in a letter found by police in their 18th floor apartment. No details are being released publicly.

On Wednesday, at the orange brick building near Kipling Ave. and Eglinton Ave. W., the only trace of their plunge was a small collection of flowers and notes, damp from the overnight rain.

The sun bathed the building in light, its warm rays coaxing people outside to pay their respects at the spot.

“We’re still in shock,” said longtime friend Vlatkovic.

Another longtime friend, Joann Hanson, who lived two doors down for a time, said the two were “wonderful people who loved each other and didn’t want to live without each other.”

“(Fiser) looked after people his whole life,” she said. “He took care of her till the end.”

By all accounts, Fiser was generous and warm. At nearly 90, he still had his driver’s licence and would drive neighbours to the nearby Metro for groceries.

Fiser and Ferber appear on donor rolls at the Jewish Family and Child Service of Greater Toronto.

Neighbours said they were not religiously observant. But Fiser’s Jewish identity marked his early life, forcing him flee the Nazis in Yugoslavia when he was only a teenager.

“His father, a lawyer, was executed in the summer of the same year, along with many other family members. He fled to the Italian-occupied zone of Croatia and was interned as a war refugee until 1943, when the Germans invaded Italy,” Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham H. Foxman said during a speech in New York in 2005.

Fiser was hidden from the Nazis by a friendly policeman and smuggled to Switzerland, where he spent the remainder of the war, Foxman said.

Later, Fiser returned to Yugoslavia, where he earned a degree in economics from the University of Zagreb in 1949, Foxman said. He then moved to Israel and finally to Toronto, where he earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Toronto.

Fiser went on to work at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, which would become the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

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Much less is known about Ferber, though Vlatkovic said she was a ballerina as a young woman and later became a teacher.

While Fiser was apparently childless, Ferber had two children and two grandchildren, all of whom live abroad.

Among the bouquets of roses left on the lawn outside the building entrance were several anonymous notes.

“I cried this morning when I heard the news,” began a typewritten letter in a plastic sleeve to protect it from the rain.

“I am not sad that you left this world, after all it was your choice. I am sad because society let you down and could not help you die with dignity. I pray that you are now in God’s comfort, free from sickness and enjoying your afterlife together as you wanted.”