Henry Krystal, Polish-born American psychiatrist, Died at 90

Henry Krystal was born on April 22, 1925, in Sosnowiec, Poland, and died on October 8, 2015.

He was a Polish-born American psychiatrist.

He graduated from Wayne State University (Goethe University), in 1950 and then from its School of Medicine.

Just after the Nazi invasion, his brother and then father escaped to the Soviet occupied zone of Poland while Henry and his mother lived in Bodzentyn, Poland.

Krystal was sent to a labor camp, in 1942 and his mother (Dora Grossman) sent to Treblinka where she died.

He has worked in a factory operated by the Siemens company.

He was a member of a labor Kommando, that was sent from place to place.

At the end of the war Krystal ended up in the city of Schwerin, in the British occupied zone of Germany.

In 1947 Krystal immigrated to Detroit, Michigan, where he lived with an aunt, he went to school and became a psychiatrist.

Over the many years he has been a professor of psychiatry at the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, and interviewed more than 2,000 survivors of the Holocaust, drew on his own wartime reflections and studied the responses of victims of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, Japan.

He left behind his wife, the former Esther Reichstein; his sons, John, who is the chairman of the psychiatry department at Yale, and Andrew, who is a psychiatry professor at Duke; and three grandchildren.

Henry Krystal passed away at 90 yrs old.