los angeles (jps) | Businessman and philanthropist Fred Kort, 80, one of only nine people known to have survived the Treblinka death camp, died recently in Los Angeles.
Demonstrating the same resourcefulness and willingness to take risks that helped him survive the beginning and end of his internment at the camp where 800,000 Jews died, Kort made his fortune by leaving the toy company where he was employed for 20 years and starting his own manufacturing company, the Imperial Toy Corp.
Born Manfred Kort in Leipzig, Germany, he was deported with his Polish-born parents after Kristallnacht. In Poland, the family was separated by the Germans when they invaded. After spending time in the Warsaw Ghetto and a labor camp, Kort ended up in Treblinka in July 1943. On arrival, he was assigned to be among those to be gassed. But from among the huddle he declared in German that he was an electrician, and he was sent to work detail.
As the gunfire of the approaching Russian army was heard in Treblinka in June 1944, the 550 remaining Jews knew that they would be soon shot by the Germans so as not to leave eyewitnesses. When guards burst into his barracks and ordered the inmates to lie down, Kort ran to a storage shed, which was subsequently searched, but he was not discovered.
Rejected by the anti-Semitic Polish resistance fighters, he made the dangerous crossing into Russian-held territory, followed by a stint with the Polish army.
Kort testified at the Nuremberg Trials, drawing from memory a detailed map of Treblinka that served as a reference throughout the trial.
He was a major benefactor of Holocaust museums and one of the first survivors to join Steven Spielberg in partnership for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.