Erich Kulka

Erich Kulka was born in 1911 in Vsetín

Erich Kulka was born Erich Schön in Vsetín in 1911, the youngest of five children in a Jewish family. He studied at a gymnasium in Valašské Meziříčí and in the early 1930s worked for the company of Rudolf Deutelbaum. He married Elly Kulka in 1938, and their son Otto was born in 1933.

In 1939 the Gestapo arrested him for anti-Nazi activity and held him in Špilberk prison in Brno. He was later held in Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme, and in Auschwitz from 1942 to 1945. In Birkenau he worked in a maintenance workshop with Ota Kraus, which let him move between camps and help other prisoners.

During the evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945, he escaped with his son Otto Dov and they hid until the war ended. His parents, two sisters and his wife died in the Holocaust. After the war he and his son took the surname Kulka.

With Ota Kraus he wrote The Death Factory, a documentary book about Auschwitz, and Night and Fog, a study of the camps' economic system. In 1964 he and his son testified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which he covered in Judges, Prosecutors, Advocates. He also wrote about the Eichmann trial and the novella Escape from Auschwitz.

After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he moved to Israel and continued his research at the Hebrew University and Yad Vashem. In 1977 he was among the founders of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and in 1993 he set up a fund in his name at the Hebrew University. He died in Jerusalem in 1995 and was buried at Har HaMenuchot.