Richard Glazar

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Richard Glazar (born on 29. November 1920 in Prague as Richard goldsmith ; died on 20th December 1997 ) was a Czech survivor of the death camp Treblinka .

Life

Richard Goldschmid's father had been an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army until the end of the First World War , he was deported in 1940 and died. Richard grew up in Prague, his parents divorced in 1932, his mother Olga married a businessman in 1936, she survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Goldschmid received his Matura in 1939, he began studying economics at the Charles University in Prague , which was closed in November 1939 with the Prague special for Czech students.

By mid-1942 Glazar managed to hide with farmers in a village. In September 1942 the Germans deported him to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and in October he was deported as a working Jew to the Treblinka extermination camp . During the Treblinka uprising on August 2, 1943, some of these prison functionaries managed to escape. While most of the refugees were picked up and killed near the camp, Glazar managed to escape. With his fellow inmate Karel Unger, he made his way through Poland to Germany as an allegedly dispersed Czech foreign worker . At Heinrich Lanz AG in Mannheim , he survived the period up to the German surrender with false papers as an armaments worker.

After the war he studied in Prague and London with a degree in industrial engineering and in 1947 changed his name to Glazar. In 1949 he married Zdenka Vitková and they had two children. However, he was persecuted as a Jew again in the course of the Slansky trial and had to work (again) as a metal worker in the smelting works in Kladno in 1952/53 . He then worked as a librarian for the Czech Academy of Sciences until 1968 .

After the failure of the Prague Spring , the family fled to Bern in Switzerland in 1969 , where they had to struggle with great language difficulties and Glazar was temporarily unemployed. He finally found a job at the economic research company Prognos AG in Basel .

In 1963 and 1971 he testified in the Düsseldorf trials as one of 54 survivors of the uprising in Treblinka against the accused. Glazar impressed in his testimony with his phenomenal memory, extreme clarity and an unusual ability to differentiate, which earned him the highest recognition as a witness by the judges. Many of his statements found their way into the verdicts. In a long conversation with Claude Lanzmann for his documentary Shoah (1974–1985), Glazar reported in great detail about his experiences in the Treblinka extermination camp. In the last years of his life he gave numerous lectures at universities and cultural institutions about his fate as a survivor of Treblinka. He also organized readings and discussions with school classes to convey what he had experienced. He and his wife set up a second home in a Jewish retirement home in Prague. He founded the Golem organization , which aims to create a culture of remembrance in the Czech Republic, and in 1997 he was awarded the Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk Order .

His experience report, The Trap with the Green Fence , written immediately after the end of the war, is not only a moving book, but also an important source for historians on an extermination camp .

Glazar was psychologically traumatized by the experiences in the extermination camp and after the cancer death of his wife, who had supported him for many years, he committed suicide by falling out of the window of the Prague retirement home.

Works (selection)

  • The trap with the green fence. Survival in Treblinka , Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992, with a foreword by Wolfgang Benz ; New edition: Unrast-Verlag 2008, ISBN 978-3-89771-819-7 .

literature

  • Wolfgang Benz : German Jews in the 20th Century: A History in Portraits . Munich: Beck, 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-62292-2 , therein: The shadows of the past: Richard Glazar , pp. 299–308

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Glazar, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech survivor of the Treblinka extermination camp
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH December 20, 1997
Place of death Prague