His son Michel, who announced his father’s death, declared: “A small microscopic coronavirus has succeeded where the whole Nazi army had failed.’’

Henri Kischka, one of the last Belgian survivors of the Holocaust, died on Saturday of coronavirus in a Jewish home for elderly in Brussels. He was 94 years old.

Deported during the Second World War, he experienced at the age of 16 the horror of the Nazi  camps of Buchenwald, Sakrau, Blechhammer and Gross-Rosen.

After the war and until the end of his life, Kichka worked for the duty of memory by going to tell his story in schools and accompanying youths to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

He was born in Brussels in 1926 to parents who had fled anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe to build new lives in the West.

In the first week of September 1942, they were taken from their Brussels home as the Nazi  soldiers sealed off the street where they lived near the South station in the middle of the night and went from building to building shouting: “Alle Juden raus!” (All Jews out!)

Within a week, the family was in a convoy of cattle wagons on a railway transport heading back east – first to Germany and then to occupied Poland.

Henri and his father, Josek, were taken off the train with the other men in the small town of Kosel. They were to work as slave labourers, destined to be murdered in the gas chambers only when they were no longer of economic use to the Third Reich.

The women of the family – Henri’s mother, Chana, his sisters Bertha and Nicha and his Aunt Esther – were taken to Auschwitz where they were gassed and cremated as soon as they arrived.

“I was 90% dead. I was a skeleton. I was in a sanatorium for months and in hospital,” he recounted after the liberation of the camps.

For years after the war, Henri never spoke of that suffering as though his memory was overwhelmed by darkness.

He married, opened a shop with his wife, and built a family: four children, nine grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. The man who had cheated death drew strength from creating new life.

He started to give lectures in schools and to accompany youths to visit the former Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp,  feeling it was worth suffering the pain of remembering himself to make sure that others did not forget. In 2005, he wrote an autobiography: ”An adolescence lost in the night of the camps”.

Asked to describe his survival in hell, he told Belgian public radio: “The worst part was the food. When it was there. It was what we called dry bread. Soup, we received it from time to time but I was very kind when I said it was called soup. We hardly ate anything. The terrible thing was that we were rubbish. There are no other words. When I saw my friends dying one after the other, I wondered each time, when was my turn?.’’

He said: “The majority of those who have suffered half of what I have lived do not dare to testify, they are in tears, they are very touched. While I, I think that in all my life, I have the duty to tell others in order to warn them against a tyranny that the world had never known. Concentration camps … innocent victims who did not even have time to enter the camp, who went directly to the crematorium  per hundred thousand. Gassed, burned and their bones buried.”

His son Michel, a famous cartoonist who lives in Israel and announced his father’s death, declared: “A small microscopic Coronavirus has succeeded where the whole Nazi army had failed.’’