Polish-Argentine writer and Holocaust survivor Jack Fuchs dies at 93
Polish-Argentine writer Jack Fuchs, who became the voice of Argentina's community of Holocaust survivors through books, columns, lectures, and interviews, died Friday in Buenos Aires. He was 93.
Born Yankele Fuks, the second of four brothers in a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland, in 1924, his otherwise happy childhood was turned upside down by the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. His family, like most of Łódź's Jews, were banished to a designated ghetto in 1940, and in August 1944 he and his family were deported to Auschwitz.
Selected by his Nazi captors to work in Dachau, he never saw his family again.
"On May 8, 1945, the horror came to an end," Fuchs recalled. "I remember the feeling as we got off the train the Nazis had put us in to make sure no witnesses remained alive. Allied planes had bombed the train, and I felt I had died."
"I walked through the Bavarian countryside and fell from exhaustion in a farm. For days a German family fed me, and then took me to the Allied hospital in Saint Ottilien Monastery. That's how I spent the end of the war. I had lost everyone at Auschwitz, and was alive - despite being sentenced to die like millions of other people."
Fuchs emigrated to the United States in 1946, and in 1963 to Argentina - home to Latin America's largest Jewish community. He settled in Buenos Aires, married a woman from France, and together ran a small garment mill. For Fuchs, the demanding nature of the business was also a way to bury wartime memories.
"I could only think of how to start over," he said. "You cannot live with pain. Nature itself helps you by creating a filter. One does not commit to remember or forget; you simply go on."
Long reluctant to speak of the Holocaust even with family members, Fuchs was interviewed on the subject by the Steven Spielberg Foundation in 1993. The experience encouraged him to share his memories with the broader public, and he quickly became a favorite in lecture and interview circuits in universities and other institutions across Argentina.
Fuchs authored numerous columns for the left-leaning Buenos Aires daily Página/12, authored two books - Time to Remember (1995) and Dilemmas of Memory (2006) - and was the subject of a 2012 documentary, The Tree on the Wall. He was named an Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires in 2010.
"The end of the war also meant trying to understand man's war against himself," he once noted. "That's the war behind all the others."
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pagina12.com.ar%2F58981-la-ultima-muerte-de-jack-fuchs&edit-text=
Jack Fuchs, 1924-2017.
