Flossenbürg/New York (dpa/lby) - The former concentration camp prisoner Jack Terry died at the age of 92. This was announced by the spokesman for the Flossenbürg Memorial (Neustadt an der Waldnaab district), Jörg Skriebeleit, on Thursday. "Der Neue Tag" had previously reported on it. For many years, Terry campaigned for the memory of the crimes in the Flossenbürg concentration camp and was a spokesman for the former prisoners for many years. It was important to him "that something remains of this terrible place that should never have existed" - as Terry himself once put it.
Terry rejected the terms "concentration camp survivor" and "contemporary witness" and didn't want to be taken as such, according to Skriebeleit. A few years ago, Terry retired from his spokesperson role. The political consequences of the Holocaust were not concrete enough for him and the "never again" said at commemorations seemed ritualized. "The world has learned nothing," was Terry's summary.
Terry was born Jakub Szabmacher in 1930 near the Polish city of Lublin. During the Nazi regime, he was first taken to the Budzyn labor camp, then to the Wieliczka subcamp and finally, at the age of 14, to Flossenbürg. There he experienced the liberation by the Americans in 1945. He was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. "Although I left Flossenbürg as soon as I could, Flossenbürg never left me in my life," he later said.
After the liberation, a US family adopted him, he studied geology and medicine. In New York, where Terry lived until the end, he worked as a psychoanalyst. In 1995 he came to Flossenbürg on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the liberation, became the spokesman for the former prisoners and warned against forgetting.
Jack Terry died on October 30 surrounded by his friends and family after a short, serious illness.
