Arek Hersh | |
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| Born | 13 September 1928 Sieradz, Poland |
Arek Hersh, MBE (born 13 September 1928) is a survivor of the Holocaust.
Arek Hersh | |
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| Born | 13 September 1928 Sieradz, Poland |
Arek Hersh, MBE (born 13 September 1928) is a survivor of the Holocaust.
Arek Hersh (Herszlikowicz - הרשליקוביץ׳) was born in Sieradz, Poland on 13 September 1928. [1] He was the son of a bootmaker for the Polish army and a homemaker. [2] At the age of eleven, following Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, he was taken to his first concentration camp. The camp started out with 2,500 men; eighteen months later only eleven were alive. Hersh was moved around several camps before being taken to Auschwitz. Even as a young boy at the time, Hersh deduced that those who were placed in a group with sick, young or old people were considered by the Nazis to be of no use and would be killed. Consequently, while Jews were standing in two queues of fitter and weaker people before entering the camp, Hersh crossed to the fitter queue during a commotion near the rear of the line (SS officers tried to take a child from its mother), and in doing so, saved his own life. [3] As the war approached its conclusion and Germany was surrounded by the Allies, Hersh and the other Jews at Auschwitz were transported across the country. He was eventually liberated at Theresienstadt (Terezin, Czechoslovakia) on 8 May 1945 by the Soviet Army. There were 5,000 Jews in his town but only 40 of them came out alive. [4]
The night before he was liberated, Hersh and a few other survivors found an unguarded German warehouse, from which they took as much food as they wanted; they ate so much that their stomachs hurt due to the sudden intake of rich fatty foods which they had lacked for so long. For Hersh, it was his first taste of chocolate in five years. The Soviet soldiers let all of the surviving Jews do whatever they wanted with the Germans; Arek took the captain's food to show him how it felt to starve.
Hersh was included in a group of 300 Holocaust-surviving children who, following their liberation, were brought to the Lake District in England as part of a rehabilitation plan. Their journey is documented in the BBC film The Windermere Children . [5] [6] They were given just seven hours of English lessons and had to learn the rest for themselves.
Hersh lost 81 members of his immediate family in the Holocaust. [7] Only one of his sisters survived. [8]
In 1948, Hersh volunteered to fight in the Israeli Defence Forces "to contribute towards the war of independence".
Hersh met his wife Jean at a dance in Leeds at the age of 32. They have three children and several grandchildren. [9] [10] He currently lives near Leeds, England. In 1995, as part of his first public discussion of his Holocaust experiences, Hersh published his book, A Detail of History. [11] All the proceeds go to the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre, where he often gives presentations about his experience. [12]
Hersh was the subject of the award-winning documentary "Arek" (2005) produced by UNISON and directed by Tony Lloyd. [13]
In 2009, he was awarded an MBE for voluntary service to Holocaust education.
In 2017 he was immortalised in a sculpture by Frances Segelman for the Leeds Makor Jewish Culture Office. [14]
In 2019 Arek was one of the subjects in the BBC drama "The Windermere Children" telling the story of the child survivors of the Nazi Holocaust that has devastated Europe's Jewish population on arrival to Calgarth Estate by Lake Windermere in 1945.[ citation needed ]
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps, or killing centers, in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extermination through labour was also used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps. Millions were also murdered in concentration camps, in the Aktion T4, or directly on site.
Melvin Mermelstein was a Czechoslovak-born American Holocaust survivor and autobiographer. A Jew, he was the sole survivor of his family's extermination at Auschwitz concentration camp.
Płaszów or Kraków-Płaszów was a Nazi concentration camp operated by the SS in Płaszów, a southern suburb of Kraków, in the General Governorate of German-occupied Poland. Most of the prisoners were Polish Jews who were targeted for destruction by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Many prisoners died because of executions, forced labor, and the poor conditions in the camp. The camp was evacuated in January 1945, before the Red Army's liberation of the area on 20 January.
This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust, including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
Sigmund Sobolewski was a Polish Catholic Holocaust survivor and activist. He was the 88th prisoner to enter Auschwitz on the first transport to the concentration camp on June 14, 1940, and remained a prisoner for four and a half years during World War II. He was an opponent of Holocaust denial and was notable as a non-Jewish victim and witness who confronted neo-Nazis, antisemites and Holocaust deniers. His life and memories as a survivor are recounted in Prisoner 88: The Man in Stripes by Rabbi Roy Tanenbaum.
Sir Benjamin "Ben" Helfgott was a Polish-born British Holocaust survivor, Olympian and champion weightlifter. He was one of two Jewish athletes known to have competed in the Olympics after surviving the Holocaust, along with Alfred Nakache, a French champion swimmer and water polo player. Helfgott spent his adult life promoting Holocaust education, meeting with national leaders in the UK to promote cultural integration and peace.
Trevor Avery is an artist, curator and producer who has been based in London, the Highlands of Scotland, and is now in the North West of England.
David Dario Gabbai was a Greek Sephardi Jew and Holocaust survivor, notable for his role as a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. He was deported to the camp in March 1944 and put to work in one of the crematoria at Birkenau, where he was forced to assist in burning the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews that were deported to the camp during the spring and summer of that year.
Eva Schloss is an Austrian-English Holocaust survivor, memoirist and stepdaughter of Otto Frank, the father of Margot and diarist Anne Frank. Schloss speaks widely of her family's experiences during the Holocaust and is a participant in the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive project to record video answers to be used in educational tools.
Mayer Hersh MBE was a Polish Jew who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. Born in Sieradz to a family of six siblings, only Mayer and his brother Jakob survived. his father, mother and three other siblings were murdered in Chełmno extermination camp.
Helmut Kleinicke was a German engineer who supervised construction projects near Auschwitz concentration camp and saved Jews during the Holocaust. Kleinicke was named Righteous Among the Nations in 2018; he is one of the few Nazi Party members to be given this award, along with Oskar Schindler, Hans Walz, Karl Plagge and Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz.
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The Windermere Children is a 2020 biographical drama film written by Simon Block and directed by Michael Samuels. Based on the experience of child survivors of the Holocaust, it follows the children and staff of a camp set up on the Calgarth Estate in Troutbeck Bridge, near Lake Windermere, England, where the survivors were helped to rehabilitate, rebuild their lives, and integrate into the British society. The film was produced by Simon Block as 'executive producer' with Nancy Bornat as factual producer and Ben Evans as development producer. The film first aired on BBC Two in January 2020.
Angela Orosz-Richt is a Holocaust survivor. Of several thousand babies born at the Auschwitz complex, she is one of the few who survived to liberation. Her testimony has led to the 21st century convictions of two former Nazis.
Route to Paradise is a 2020 British short documentary film written, produced and directed by Thomas Gardner. The film follows a team of archaeologists from Staffordshire University as they attempt to uncover the former Calgarth Estate, the site where 300 Jewish children were re-located to after being liberated from Nazi Germany's concentration camps during the Holocaust.
Edward Mosberg was a Polish-born American Holocaust survivor, educator, and philanthropist. During the Holocaust, he was held by the Nazis from 14 years of age in Kraków Ghetto, Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, Auschwitz concentration camp, Mauthausen concentration camp, and a slave labor camp in Linz, Austria, that was liberated by the US Army in 1945. Nearly all of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.
Zigi Shipper was a Polish survivor of the Holocaust and public speaker. Born and raised in Łódź, Poland, he and his family were persecuted by the Nazis and, like the other Jews in the city, were forced to live in the Łódź ghetto.
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