Adolf Burger, Typographer, memoirist and Holocaust survivor, Died at 99

Adolf Burger was born on August 12, 1917, and died on December 6, 2016.

He was a Jewish Slovak typographer, memoir writer, and Holocaust survivor involved in Operation Bernhard.

The film ‘The Counterfeiters’, was based largely on his memoirs, won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

He came from a Jewish family in Kakaslomnic, then a mostly ethnic German village in the High Tatras region, Spiš County.

Burger’s father died when Adolf was  4 1⁄2, after which his mother, four siblings, and two grandparents moved to the nearby town of Poprad.

Burger entered apprenticeship with a local printer and typesetter at the age of fourteen.

Burger’s mother remarried a Christian, which gave her the status of a non-Jew in Slovakia after the introduction of anti-Jewish laws by the beginning of World War II.

The company Hashomer Hatzair helped Burger’s siblings to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine before Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews materialized.

In latter years after settling in Prague where he reconfirmed his membership in the Communist Party, which he joined in 1933, was made director of a consortium of printing houses, remarried, and had three children.

But, he was harassed by the secret police during the Communist purges of the early 1950s.

Burger later worked in a shipyard, headed a department in Prague’s municipal services, and became director of the city-sponsored taxicabs.

Adolf Burger passed away at 99 years old.