One of the last Auschwitz survivor, Paul Sobol, died in Brussels on Tuesday. He was 94. He worked with young people as a ‘’passer of memory.’’
Sobol was born in Paris in 1926 in a working-class family of Polish Jewish origin and moved to Brussels with his family two years later. He was arrested by the Gestapo together with his parents, his sister and his younger brother, on denunciation. They all were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on 13 June 1944.
Sobol was forced to take part in a death march to other camps because of the Allied advance. He took advantage of the bombing of 25 April 1945 to escape during a train transfer and take refuge in a village among French prisoners, liberated by the Americans on 1 May 1945.
Paul and his sister Betsy were the only members of the family to survive Auschwitz.
In an interview given last year, he recalled that he was “the tattooed B 3635 in Auschwitz”.