The Holocaust survivor Meyer Hersh who came to live in Manchester after the Second World War, has died at the age of ninety.
Hersh, who was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List in 2012,for services to Holocaust Education survived eighteen months at the largest and most lethal of the death camps at Auschwitz
He was born in Sieradz, Poland, in 1926. When the Germans arrived in his town at the beginning of World War II, he and his brother Jakob were eventually parted from their parents and siblings and extended family. They never saw any of them again.
Mayer would experience the horrors of the Holocaust where he witnessed murder, brutality, even cannibalism and experienced nine camps including Otoczna, Auschwitz, Stutthof, Gotha, Buchenwald and Theresienstadt where he was eventually liberated in 1945.
He was in Auschwitz for 18 months and, amazingly, met his brother there. Jakob also survived the war, eventually emigrating to the United States.
It was only after the war that he discovered the terrible fate of his parents and sister Kayla.
Unable to return to his native Poland, he ended up in the Lake District before settling in Manchester where he took up the profession of a Tailor as his father had once been, only talking about the war after his retirement
