Jack Terry, the former concentration camp prisoner and spokesman for the survivors of Flossenbürg, has died at the age of 92.
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Sebastian Beck
Even in old age he did not look like an old man. No, Jack Terry had retained something boyish, a wiry frame and a sharp mind. He walked with slightly springy steps across the roll call area of the Flossenbürg concentration camp memorial. But when he showed his companion the heating tunnel in 2019, in which he hid for days in the spring of 1945, his eyes filled with tears from one moment to the next. Then he was again 14-year-old Jakub Szabmacher from Belzyce, the boy who was freed by American troops along with other doomed people. “Although I left Flossenbürg as soon as I could, Flossenbürg never left me in my life,” he later said. And he repeated another sentence over and over again: “The day of my liberation was the saddest day of my life.” The Nazis had killed his mother and sister before his eyes.