Holocaust survivor Shlomo Graber died in Basel at the age of 99. He was one of the last witnesses of the holocaust and the crimes of Nazi-Fascism still living in Switzerlan
The death was confirmed this morning by the Rhenish Jewish Community at the request of the Keystone-ATS news agency.
Born in 1926 in Maidan – a town that at the time belonged to Czechoslovakia and is now part of the Ukrainian oblast of Transcarpathia – Graber settled with his family in Hungary at the age of five.
In May 1944, he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where the Nazis exterminated his mother, siblings and other relatives, as Graber himself recounts in his autobiography Dreimal dem Tod entkommen (Escaped Death Three Times).
After the war, he settled in Israel where he served in the army for seven years before finally moving to Switzerland in 1989. In Basel, he devoted his life to writing and painting (in the old town he ran the Galerie Spalentor with his partner). He committed himself to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive not only in his books, but also in schools as a guest of honour.
