Adolf Burger - Life

Life

Adolf Burger was born to a Jewish family in Veľká Lomnica, then a mostly ethnic German village in the High Tatras region, Spiš County. His father died when Adolf was four, 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.

Burger's activity was discovered. He was arrested on 11 August 1942, seven months after his marriage to his wife Gizela. Following his arrest, the couple were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp where Gizela was killed later that year. He was assigned to work at the new arrivals selection ramps.

After eighteen months at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Burger's training came through for him once more. He was selected for Operation Bernhard, transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in April 1944, and eventually to the Ebensee site of the Mauthausen camp network where he was liberated by the US Army on 6 May 1945.

Upon returning to the place of his mother's residence at Poprad, Burger found out that, although exempt from deportation by Slovak law, she and his Christian stepfather had only months earlier been deported and killed. The application of the law changed when the German military took control of his country after the failed uprising of 1944. He then settled in Prague where he reconfirmed his membership in the Communist Party, which he joined in 1933, was made director of a consortium of printing houses, remarried, and had three children. He was harassed by the secret police during the Communist purges of the early 1950s. He later worked in a shipyard, headed a department in Prague's municipal services, and became director of the city-sponsored taxicabs.