Adolf Burger
| Adolf Burger | |
|---|---|
Burger in Paris, 2008
|
|
| Born |
12 August 1917 Kakaslomnic, Szepes County, Kingdom of Hungary (present-day Slovakia) |
| Died | 6 December 2016 (aged 99) Prague, Czech Republic |
| Residence | Prague - Spořilov |
| Nationality |
Slovak (ethnic) Czech Republic (citizen) |
| Education | typography apprenticeship |
| Occupation | typographer Nazi prisoner counterfeiter printing plant director |
| Known for | memoirs on Operation Bernhard |
| Political party | Communist Party |
| Spouse(s) | Gizela (30 May 1920-Dec. 1942) Anna (d. ca. 2004) |
| Children | three |
Adolf Burger (12 August 1917 – 6 December 2016) was a Jewish Slovak typographer, memoir writer, and Holocaust survivor involved in Operation Bernhard. The film The Counterfeiters, based largely on his memoirs, won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Adolf Burger was born to a Jewish family in Kakaslomnic, then a mostly ethnic German village in the High Tatras region, Spiš County. His father died when Adolf was 4 1⁄2, after which his mother, four siblings, and two grandparents moved to the nearby town of Poprad. He entered apprenticeship with a local printer and typesetter at the age of fourteen. His mother remarried a Christian, which gave her the status of a non-Jew in Slovakia after the introduction of anti-Jewish laws by the beginning of World War II. The organization Hashomer Hatzair helped Burger's siblings to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine before Adolf Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews materialized.
Adolf Burger did not join them and took up a job in a printing house in Bratislava in 1938. During World War II, before Slovakia started to deport its Jewish citizens to German concentration camps in 1942, he became one of those who received government-sponsored waivers from deportations as someone with skills indispensable for the country's economy. At the request of resistance members, Burger began to print false baptismal certificates for Jews scheduled for deportation, which stated that they had been Roman Catholic from birth, or baptized so before World War II. Slovaks with such documents were not deported.
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