Siegfried Halbreich, a survivor of four Nazi concentration camps who devoted the second half of his long life to public education about the horrors that Jews experienced during World War II, died of heart failure Wednesday at his Beverly Hills home. He was 98.
Halbreich was among the first Jews to be sent to the camps in 1939. Five-and-a-half years later, he was one of the few to emerge alive.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1960, he became one of the Holocaust's most vocal witnesses, giving talks in elementary schools, high schools, colleges, churches and synagogues. By the time he stopped, about three years ago, he had given 2,500 free lectures around the world on the abominations he lived through during Hitler's reign.
"Very few people were imprisoned as long and in as many prisons as he was," said John K. Roth, a Holocaust scholar and professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, who frequently invited Halbreich to speak to his classes. But he said what Halbreich accomplished after leaving the camps was also extraordinary.
"He would speak with great truthfulness about the hard things he had seen and endured. But there was always a note of determination to go forward," Roth said, "to help people remember that the world can be a brutal and nasty place, but that it doesn't have to be that way."
In 1996, Halbreich told a group of Riverside high school students that it was "not a pleasure to go . . . from place to place to talk about the horrible past we had to endure. But I feel it is my obligation to tell people what was going on and to warn them. This," he said of the Nazi's campaign of extermination, "should never happen again to anyone."
Halbreich was born Nov. 13, 1909, in the town of Dziedzice in what is now southern Poland. He had a degree from the University of Krakow and worked as a pharmacist until the war began.
In 1939, after the German army occupied Poland, he tried to escape to what was then Yugoslavia, but he was caught and deported to the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, where he and 400 other prisoners were jammed into a barracks built for 100.
In 1941, he was transferred to the Gross-Rosen camp in what is now Rogoznica, Poland. A year later, he was sent to Auschwitz, where, because of his pharmacy training, he was assigned to work in the camp hospital.
Secretly he led resistance efforts, he told The Times in a 2004 interview. He sheltered younger prisoners, gave them food and medicine and helped many escape the brutality of their captors.
