Antoni Dobrowolski |
It is hard to believe that after so much pain and suffering, the victim was able to reach the very old age of 108, according to reports.
The oldest known survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, a teacher who taught in defiance of his native Nazi occupation of Poland, has died at the age of 108, an official said Monday.
Antoni Dobrowolski died Sunday in the Polish city of northwest Debno, according to Jaroslaw Mensfelt, a spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.
After the invasion of Poland in 1939, sparking the Second World War, the Germans forbade anything beyond four years of elementary education in an attempt to crush the Polish culture and intelligentsia of the country. The Germans consider Poles inferior beings, and educational policy was part of a plan to use the Poles as a slave race.
A clandestine effort by the Poles to continue teaching children immediately emerged, with those caught punished by being sent to concentration camps or prisons. Dobrowolski was among those participating in the Polish underground effort, and was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz in June 1942.
“Auschwitz was worse than hell,” he recalled in a video made when he was 103.
Dobrowolski, born October 8, 1904 in Wolborz, Poland, was later transferred to the concentration
camp Gross-Rosen and Sachsenhausen, according to the Auschwitz memorial museum in southern Poland.
After the war, he moved to Debno, where he worked as a teacher of Polish language and as a director of a primary school and later at a high school for many years.
He will be buried in Debno Wednesday.
At least 1.1 million people were killed by the Germans in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of the victims were Jews, but many non-Jewish Poles, Romanians and others also died there.
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