Richard Glazar

Richard Glazar
Richard Glazar on the cover of his book titled Trap with a Green Fence
Born	Richard Goldschmid November 29, 1920 Prague, Czechoslovakia
Died	December 20, 1997 (aged 77) Prague
Known for	Treblinka survivor, author of Treblinka memoir

Richard Glazar, born Richard Goldschmid (November 29, 1920 – December 20, 1997), was a Czech Jew who lived through World War II. He was one of only a small group of survivors of the Treblinka death camp prisoner revolt. He portrayed the horror of Treblinka in his autobiographical book titled Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka (1994). Glazar committed suicide at the age of 77, after the death of his wife.

Glazar was born in Prague in newly sovereign Czechoslovakia. His family was Jewish Bohemian. His father Hugo Glazar served in the Austro-Hungarian Army before independence. As such, the family spoke both Czech and German — a skill that would stand him in good stead later in life. In 1932, Glazar's parents divorced. His mother married a wealthy leather merchant, Quido Bergmann, and four years later they had two children, Karel and Adolf. During World War II, Karel died in the Austrian concentration camp at Mauthausen on May 17, 1942. Adolf was captured by the Nazis but later rescued by the Danish Red Cross. Glazar's father, Hugo, died of pneumonia in the Soviet Union, to which he had escaped from the Nisko reservation in the General Government of occupied Poland; some 1,100 Czech Jews had been deported there by the Nazis in 1939. The only member of his family still alive when he returned to Prague in 1945 was his mother, who had survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

Richard Glazar was accepted into the Charles University in Prague, in June 1939. He was originally enrolled as a philosophy student, but anti-Jewish legislation after the German occupation forced him into a course reading Economics. His entire family had the chance to move to England at Christmas in 1938, when his stepfather obtained a permit. Glazar, however did not take this opportunity, as he did not want to leave behind all that he had built up in Czechoslovakia. At this stage there could have been little understanding of the horrors that were to occur in the coming years.