Roman Kent

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Roman Kent on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2017 in Washington

Roman Kent (born on 18th April 1929 as a Roman Kniker in Lodz ( Poland ), died on 21st May 2021 in New York City , United States ) was a Polish-American Holocaust survivor, and since 2011 president of the International Auschwitz Committee .

Life

Kniker was the son of the textile manufacturer Emanuel Kniker and his wife Sonia. He grew up with three siblings and attended the private Jewish school in his hometown of Łódź, until it was closed by the German occupation forces after the occupation of Poland at the beginning of the Second World War . The family also had to leave the apartment and lived for some time in a room in the father's confiscated factory until they were taken to the ghetto in late 1939 , where his father died of malnutrition in 1943. When the ghetto was liquidated in 1944, the rest of the Kniker family were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where Roman was separated from his mother and sisters. Together with his brother he went through other concentration camps in Mertzbachtal, Dornau and Flossenbürg until the two were liberated by the US Army in April 1945 on the death march from Flossenbürg to Dachau.

In June 1946, Roman and Leon Kniker immigrated to the United States, where they simplified their family name to Kent.

Kent was President of the International Auschwitz Committee since 2011. Also in 2011, at the suggestion of US President Barack Obama, he became a member of the Advisory Board of the US Holocaust Memorial Council. He was also chairman of the American organization of Shoah survivors and their descendants and president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, an organization that helps needy non-Jews who saved Jews during the time of the Shoah.

Kent was treasurer of the Jewish Claims Conference.

Honors

Fonts (selection)

  • Courage Was My Only Option: The Autobiography of Roman Kent. With a foreword by Lawrence Eagleburger . Vantage Press, New York, 2008, ISBN 0-533-15653-X .
  • Beth B. Cohen (Ed.): Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (New Jersey) / London, 2018, ISBN 978-0-8135-8497-3 .

Filmography

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 2015 Dinner Honoree - Roman R. Kent. In: jfr.org. October 14, 2015, accessed May 22, 2021 .
  2. ↑ Ayala Goldmann: Federal Cross of Merit for Roman Kent: 85-year-old Shoah survivor and Treasurer of the Claims Conference received an award. In: juedische-allgemeine.de . May 23, 2014, accessed May 22, 2021 .
personal data
SURNAME Kent, novel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kniker, Roman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Shoa survivor
DATE OF BIRTH April 18, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Łódź (Poland)
DATE OF DEATH May 21, 2021
PLACE OF DEATH new York