Ted Bolgar at his home in Montreal on Dec. 1, 2024. He spent his later years to educating Canadians about the Holocaust.SEBASTIEN ST-JEAN/Getty Images
Much of Ted Bolgar’s time in Nazi captivity was spent in lesser-known sites where thousands suffered and died in ghastly circumstances – the Satoraljaujhely ghetto, the Warsaw labour camp, the Mühldorf concentration camp, the Mittergars sub-camp.
He survived each of those places of internment, rebuilt a new life in Montreal and dedicated his later years to educating fellow Canadians about the Holocaust.
Mr. Bolgar died last Saturday, two months short of his 102nd birthday.
“He was a gifted speaker who connected deeply with people of all ages and backgrounds, building empathy, and promoting awareness of the Shoah,” the Montreal Holocaust Museum said in a statement.
He had been among 430,000 Hungarian Jews deported in the spring of 1944, the last large-scale roundup by the Nazis, even as the Third Reich’s prospects of victory in the Second World War were fading away.
His experience exemplified the extent to which the regime’s camp system had metastasized into tens of thousands of sites spread all over occupied Europe, most of which remain little-known to the general public today.
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In the encyclopedia that it began publishing in 2009, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum identified more than 20,000 camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe. Its authors said that this highlighted “the sheer scale of the system of perpetration constructed by the Nazis and their allies.”
To Holocaust deniers, Mr. Bolgar had a simple reply: “I wish you were right. Then I would have a family and a nice life in Hungary.”
Paul Herczeg, Ted Bolgar, James Indig and Tommy Strasser, who immigrated to Canada in 1948 under the Jewish orphan program, share a joke while greeting each other in Montreal, Oct. 26, 2008.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
He was born Tibor Polgar on Sept. 12, 1924, the elder of the two children of Sandor Polgar and Adele Mueller, shopkeepers in the Hungarian town of Sarospatak.
His father had served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. In school, young Tibor had Jewish and gentile friends. “I was brought up as a Hungarian,” he recalled in video testimonies recorded for the Montreal Holocaust Museum.
However, by 1938, Hungary, now an ally of the Third Reich, began enacting antisemitic legislation modeled on the Nazis’ laws. Jews were kept away from key positions. They couldn’t marry or employ gentiles. Mr. Bolgar wanted to be a teacher but since he was barred from enrolling in university, he became an apprentice electrician.
In March 1944, Germany’s troops invaded Hungary to stop its ally from pulling out of the war.
Now under Nazi occupation, Mr. Bolgar’s family and the rest of their community were expelled from their homes by Hungarian gendarmes who forced them to hand over their jewels and consigned them to a crowded ghetto in the neighbouring town of Satoraljaujhely.
In June, they were shoehorned into cattle cars and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland.
On arrival, they had to line up on the train ramp and a German in a white coat waved each person to one side or another. Mr. Bolgar’s 13-year-old sister, Vera, was sent away from the rest of the family. Their mother said, “I want to go with my daughter,” so the SS let her follow Vera. She had unknowingly joined those destined for the gas chambers.
Mr. Bolgar and his father were among those kept for slave labour. They were shaved and sent to a barrack. The next day, they were fed – soup in one large bowl for every four to six prisoners, without utensils. “Well, you are no better than dogs. Eat,” the guards said.
“So we had to slurp it like dogs,” Mr. Bolgar recalled in the museum testimonies. “We were hungry enough to do it. And that was one of the many attempts of the Germans to dehumanize us.”
After a few days, the SS came looking for tradesmen. At his father’s urging, Mr. Bolgar, who was 19, volunteered as an electrician, hoping for better treatment.
Separated from his father, he and others were sent by train to a camp set in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, where the Germans had crushed, the previous year, the largest armed uprising by Jews against Nazi occupation.
When Mr. Bolgar’s transport arrived, most of the camp’s previous inmates had died from overwork and typhus. The area was a vast expanse of rubble and the prisoners had to pick up bricks and metal debris.
Mr. Bolgar was assigned to a German army depot, loading and unloading rail cars and trucks. It was hard work but it meant a chance to scrounge for food.
At the end of July, as the Red Army approached, the camp was evacuated. It was the first of the death marches during which the Nazis forced thousands of enfeebled prisoners on devastating treks westward, away from the Soviet front.
In the summer heat, thirst was the worst part of the journey.
At one point, the Germans let them drink from a river. When the guards blew their whistles to resume the march, one man, who was deaf, didn’t react to the signal. The SS sicced their dogs on him, and they mauled the prisoner to death. “We couldn’t do a thing,” Mr. Bolgar recalled.
After three days on foot, they were crammed into train cattle cars, where they continued to be tormented by thirst. Every morning, dead bodies had to be tossed out the door.
They eventually reached the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. It had rained and they dropped to the ground to lap from the puddles. Fewer than half of the 4,000 prisoners who started out of Warsaw were still alive.
They were then sent to Mühldorf, a Dachau sub-camp, to build a gigantic bunker covering a jet engine factory. The underfed prisoners had to haul heavy cement bags. “Naturally, they beat you if you weren’t fast enough,” Mr. Bolgar said.
Sometimes he was sent to help in the kitchen, giving him a chance to scrape for potato peels and keep from starving. On other occasions, he had to help collect dead prisoners, dragging them to a huge pit in the forest.
In November, he was dispatched to a smaller site, Mittergars, where hundreds of inmates manufactured concrete building blocks.
In the spring of 1945, they were sent back to Mühldorf. The prisoners were loaded onto a train that shuffled back and forth for a week, despite being strafed once by Allied planes.
Then one day, the guards vanished. American soldiers appeared. They found prisoners covered with lice and sickened by malnutrition. Mr. Bolgar weighed less than 90 pounds. “There was no jubilation. There was no singing and shouting. We were just too numb to feel anything.”
After recovering in a camp for displaced people, he heard that his father was alive and back in Sarospatak. He made his way home and knocked on the door. He and his father hugged and cried.
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Out of 1,034 Jews who lived in Sarospatak before the war, only 164 made it back. His father married another Holocaust survivor, Vera Bein, a widow who had given birth to a daughter, Angela, while she was a prisoner in Auschwitz.
Seeing that his father was safe and settled, Mr. Bolgar applied to immigrate to Canada.
Canada had admitted very few Jewish refugees while the Nazis were in power, but in 1947, the federal government relented and agreed to let in 1,000 Jewish orphans under 18.
Eligible orphans would have had to be in their early teens during the war. Few in that age group had survived.
Mr. Bolgar was a few years too old to apply. But someone who had outlasted Nazi camps wasn’t going to let arbitrary rules hold him back. He lied about his age. He changed his family name from Polgar to Bolgar to put himself closer to the start of the alphabetical list.
He was accepted and arrived in Montreal in 1948.
He learned English, and became a manager in a fruit wholesale business. He married Marianne Guttman, a fellow Hungarian Jew who had evaded deportation by hiding in Budapest. They raised two children. “This is my achievement in Canada,” he said of his family.
After liberation, his philosophy was that “every day of my life is a gift,” he said.
As he got older, “I got to a point where I realized that few of us are left and we are the witnesses.”
He shared his wartime experience at schools and congregations and anniversary events. He volunteered at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. He made a PowerPoint presentation about his past. During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, he carried on his outreach efforts through video sessions.
Bolgar attends the trial against Former SS guard Oskar Gröning at a court in Lueneburg, northern Germany, May 6, 2015.Philipp Schulze/The Associated Press
In 2015, Mr. Bolgar and his stepsister, Angela Richt, who was born in Auschwitz, were among survivors who testified at the trial of the former camp guard Oskar Gröning in Germany. Mr. Bolgar told the court that he wished the SS had treated their prisoners “as humanly as their shepherd dogs.”
Mr. Bolgar was predeceased by his wife, Marianne. He leaves two children, Kathy Diamond and Robert Bolgar, six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
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