“While I Breathe, I Hope” Survivor Rudy Herz

nately, the borders were closed by then. When they were taken by the authorities in 1942, they were sent to Theresienstadt. The rest of his father’s family were sent to other places within the Nazi sphere of influence. By Herz’s count, 64 family members were eventually killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. Only he and a brother survived.

Herz gave graphic descriptions of his experiences in the camps. From Theresienstadt the immediate family was sent to Auschwitz. He survived there because he could work. Everything about the way they were treated was designed to systematically take away their humanity, from shaving all their hair to the beatings to the brutal work detail. Describing seeing this brutality to fellow prisoners, Herz said, “I cannot tell you whether I feel pity—by that time ‘pity’ was a word that was expunged from our dictionaries. We no longer had pity, except for ourselves.”

Surviving Auschwitz was hardly the end of Herz’s suffering. He was taken to Lieberose to recover his health. From there, they were sent on a death march to Sachsenhausen near Berlin, then Mauthausen, in Austria. They had a work detail making munitions.

By April of 1945, Herz noticed that the Nazis were destroying documents. Suddenly, Red Cross packages started to arrive and the dreaded SS officers had just folded their tents and disappeared, leaving Austrian police in charge. Weeks later, an American tank came up to the gates and told them to stay where they were, they were being liberated. Later, he found out he had a surviving brother who was in New York and joined him.

His life in the US was not without difficulties. He was drafted and sent to Korea with US forces to fight the Chinese. He returned and then went to France where he met his wife Ursula Syré, who was also German, taking her back to the US. He learned skills as a watchmaker, getting a job first in Chicago, then Atlanta. When the watch business dried up in the 1960s, they moved to Myrtle Beach, where his wife’s skills as a landscape architect allowed them to open a garden and nursery business. They had three children, Carolyn,

Herz did speak to students in the area, and at one point was invited by high school students in Stommeln to return to speak to them about the Holocaust. The German author Josef Wisskirchen wrote a book detailing Herz’s life and experiences. ■

His daughter, Chantal Herz Fryer, works for the SC Department of Commerce. She remembers him as extroverted and optimistic, qualities that got him through his ordeals. Rudy Herz related to the South Carolina motto, “While I breathe, I hope.” He would sometimes relate isolated episodes of his experiences to them, but did not tell them everything that happened, as he didn’t want to leave then scarred as he was. For example, he told them that the tattoo on his arm was something he picked up in the army.