Jack Terry

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Jack Terry 2008

Jack Terry (born March 10, 1930 in Eastern Poland: actually Jakub Szabmacher ) is a Polish-American author. During the Second World War he was the youngest surviving inmate of the Flossenbürg concentration camp .

Life

Terry was born as one of four children to a Jewish merchant family and grew up in Bełżyce . During the German occupation of Poland , his father was first deported to the Majdanek concentration camp . Bełżyce belonged to the area of ​​the Gestapo chief of Izbica, Kurt Engels , Terry was a witness to several murders that he committed. In October 1942 he and his family were expelled from the city together with the Jews still living in Bełżyce. When he noticed in the column of deportees that his mother had not come with them, he fled back to his hometown. There he found his mother and sister. His brother was shot dead during the eviction. At the beginning of 1943 the surviving members of the Szabmacher family were deported from the Bełżyce ghetto to the Budzyń camp . There he witnessed when the Unterscharfuhrer Reinhold Feix shot his mother and sister during a selection on May 8, 1943. Terry was called in to work in an aircraft yard of the Ernst Heinkel Flugzeugwerke in Budzyn . As the Red Army drew closer, he came to an aircraft production in a salt mine near Wieliczka and finally in early August 1944 in the Flossenbürg concentration camp . He was first used in the quarry, later in aircraft production and during the last three months before the camp was liberated in the prisoner laundry.

On April 8, 1945, the SS began evacuating the camp in Flossenbürg under the impression of the approaching US Army troops . The commandant Max Koegel sent the prisoners who were able to march on a death march to the Dachau concentration camp . Fellow inmates hid 15-year-old Terry in a pipe tunnel that led from the laundry to the kitchen. When the US Army took the camp on April 23, 1945, he was the youngest inmate. He was the only member of his family who survived the Holocaust .

A colonel from the invaded division took care of the orphan boy and took him to the United States. Terry only returned to Germany in the 1950s as a soldier in a unit stationed in Heidelberg . He initially studied geology in the USA, but later switched to psychoanalysis and now lives in New York City .

In 1995, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the camp's liberation, he returned to Flossenbürg to meet with former prisoners. Since then Terry has been coming to Flossenbürg every year. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Bavarian Memorials Foundation and spokesman for the former prisoners of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. In 2005, a book was created under the title Jakub's World , in which he tells the story of his life. In January 2011, ZDF showed the 45-minute documentary The Two Lives of Jack Terry .

In July 2007 Terry was awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit for his outstanding civic engagement .

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personal data
SURNAME Terry, Jack
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Szabmacher, Jakub (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-American author
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Eastern Poland