Saul Blau

Prepared by the Witnesses of War team

Saul Blau was born on 17 December 1930 in Tarpa, Hungary, into an observant Jewish family with seven children. He experienced antisemitism at school long before the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. On the last day of Passover that spring, his family was forced from its home and subsequently deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Only thirteen years old, Saul survived the arrival selection by claiming he was sixteen. His parents and younger sister were murdered. Registered as prisoner A-3913, he was sent to Jawischowitz, an Auschwitz subcamp, where he endured exhausting forced labour in a coal mine.

As Soviet forces approached in January 1945, Saul was forced onto a death march and eventually transported to Buchenwald. There, Antonín Kalina, a non-Jewish political prisoner who led his barrack, helped protect him and other Jewish prisoners by providing badges identifying them as prisoners of other nationalities. Saul survived until American forces liberated Buchenwald on 11 April 1945, when he was fourteen.

After liberation, he returned to Hungary searching for surviving relatives, then joined a Zionist youth immigration programme. He moved to what became Israel and served as a technician in the Israeli Air Force. After seven years, he travelled to the United States to reunite with surviving siblings. There, he met his wife, Viola Schlesinger, with whom he raised two sons. Later settling in Bal Harbour, Florida, Saul became a volunteer educator at the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach, sharing his testimony with younger generations and speaking against antisemitism and Holocaust denial.