Harry Arnstein

Harry Arnstein was born in 1927 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, into a Jewish family and grew up in Ostrava. In 1939, he escaped with his parents to Yugoslavia. Using false baptismal certificates, the family concealed their Jewish identity in a Slovenian village, where Harry learned the language and served as an altar boy. Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, they were interned in Ferramonti di Tarsia, a concentration camp in southern Italy, where they spent more than two years.

After British forces liberated Ferramonti in September 1943, sixteen-year-old Harry volunteered as an interpreter. Speaking Czech, German, Italian, English, Slovenian and Croatian, he helped British soldiers communicate with civilians and refugees. In July 1944, he joined the Czechoslovak forces and subsequently served with the Czechoslovak Independent Armoured Brigade Group, commanded by General Alois Liška.

From October 1944 to May 1945, Harry participated in the siege of Dunkirk, helping contain the German garrison. He operated a Bren Gun Carrier, a small tracked armoured vehicle, and trained with rifles and machine guns. He recalled that during fighting on 28 October 1944, he fired at a German soldier who appeared to be surrendering but was holding a grenade. As one of the youngest soldiers, he also remembered Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk affectionately calling him the unit’s “Benjamin.”

After returning to Czechoslovakia, Harry briefly worked as a lighting technician at Barrandov film studios before emigrating to the United States in 1946. During the Korean War, he served stateside in a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographic unit. His life thus encompassed imprisonment under Fascism and service in three armies: British, Czechoslovak and American. He later settled on Long Island, retaining his Czech citizenship and his connection to his homeland.