Henry Silberstern, Survivor
Henry Silberstern was born in 1930 to a middle-class family in Teplice, northern Bohemia. Henry moved with his family to Prague in 1938, shortly before the Nazis took over all of Czechoslovakia.
In 1942, when he was 12, the Nazis transported Henry and his mother to the Terezin (Theresienstadt) camp, a model camp the Nazis created to deceive the world into believing they were treating Jews humanely. Henry describers Terezin at it was—a place of starvation and deprivation where Jewish adults who were incarcerated there struggled every day to make life more bearable for children. Later, Henry and his family were “selected” and sent “East”—the Nazi code-word for sending Jews to concentration camps—to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was there that Henry became one of the 89 Jewish boys who were single out by the infamous “Angel of Death”—Dr. Joseph Mengele—for slave labor.
No one knows why those 89 boys were selected from the 500 boys in the camp. Henry was transferred from Birkenau Furstengrube (a mining camp controlled by I.G. Farben), to Dora-Nordhausen (a camp supplying labor for the manufacture of V1 and V2 bombs). He was then moved once more to Bergen-Belsen where he was liberated by Canadian soldiers under the command of the British army.
Of the 15,000 children under the age of 15 who were sent "East" from Terezin, less than 150 survived. Henry is one of those children. He lost his entire family.
Henry immigrated to Canada in 1948 and moved to the US in 1954. He graduated from the University of Buffalo and went on to work at Roswell Park Cancer Center for the remainder of his working career. He retired from the Institute as Director of Information Services.
Henry has two daughters and sons-in-law and four grandchildren He travels to schools throughout the upstate New York sharing his history with thousands of students every year.
Henry has been a committed member of the Holocaust Study Group whose mission is to provide an interfaith adult education course on the Holocaust. We are extremely grateful to Henry for his dedication to teaching the lessons of the Holocaust and for keeping its memory alive.