Jack Terry

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Jack Terry

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

Life[]

Terry was one of four children born of a Jewish merchant family named Szabmacher. He grew up in Bełżyce, Poland. Under German occupation, his father was first deported to the . Bełżyce was in the , region, and Terry witnessed several murders. In October 1942, he and his family were expelled from the city together with the Jews still living there. When he realized that his mother was not in the column of deportees, he fled back to his hometown. There he found his mother and sister. His brother had been shot during the expulsion. At the beginning of 1943, the surviving members of the Szabmacher family were taken from the Bełżyce Ghetto to the Budzyń labor camp near the town of Krasnik in eastern Poland. While there he witnessed SS officer Reinhold Feix shoot his mother and sister during a selection on May 8, 1943. Terry was made to work in the aircraft yard of Budzyn's . As the Red Army approached, he was moved to an airplane production site in a salt mash at Wieliczka, and finally to Flossenbürg concentration camp at the beginning of August 1944. He first worked in a quarry, and later for aircraft factory, and during the last three months before the liberation in the prisoners' laundry.[1]

Terry was saved several times in Flossenburg by an inmate named Carl Schrade, a Swiss trader arrested in Berlin in 1934 for criticizing National Socialism. When liberated in 1945 he was the longest-held concentration-camp prisoner in Nazi Germany.

On April 8, 1945, the SS began to evacuate Flossenbürg camp under the pressure from advancing US troops. The commander, Max Koegel, sent prisoners on a death march to Dachau concentration camp. Inmates hid the 15-year-old Terry in a tube tunnel that led from the laundry to the kitchen. When the US Army entered the camp on April 23, 1945, he was the youngest prisoner and the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.

A US colonel took him out of the orphanage and to the US. Terry returned to Germany in the 1950s as a US soldier stationed in Heidelberg. In the US, he studied geology psychoanalysis, and now lives in New York City.

In 1995 he returned to Flossenburg for the 50th anniversary of its liberation and to meet former prisoners. Since then, Terry has been visited Flossenbürg annually. He is a member of the foundation board of the and spokesman for former prisoners of Flossenbürg. Author Jakub Welt told Terry's story in a 2005 book. In January 2011 ZDFneo aired a 45-minute documentary The Two Lives of Jack Terry.[2]

Terry was awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit in July 2007 for his outstanding citizenship.

References[]

  1. ^ Geissler, Cornelia (21 January 2011). "Wie aus dem 15-jährigen polnischen Juden Jakub Szabmacher, der das deutsche Konzentrationslager Flossenbürg überlebte, der amerikanische Psychoanalytiker Jack Terry wurde: Der traurigste Tag". Berliner Zeitung (in German). Retrieved 15 February 2017.
  2. ^ Bönisch, Georg (24 March 2009). "Holocaust Survivor Jack Terry: 'I Felt Sure I Would Not Live' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - International". Hamburg Germany. SPIEGEL. Retrieved 15 February 2017.
  • Jack Terry (Author), Alicia Nitetzky (trans.): Jakub's World - The Memories of Jack Terry. Bavarian State Center for Political Education, Munich 2005.
  • Talk with Jack Terry: " Civilization is a very thin varnish over human nature " in the BLZ report, ed. 4/03, ed .: Bavarian State Center for Political Education

Report at Frontal21 on September 1, 2009

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