Samuel Drix (1912–2008)

Dr. Samuel Drix was a Jewish physician and medical researcher in Lwow (Lvov), Poland, when Germany invaded in World War II. He lost all his family to the Nazi Holocaust, including his wife Frania and two-year-old daughter Sylvia, and nearly all his friends. He was deported to the Janowska concentration camp, and escaped in 1943 when the camp was closed; he spent a year in hiding with a Polish farm couple named Zawer. After the war, he worked as a successful doctor in Germany before emigrating to the USA in 1955, settling in New York City. He married again and had a son with his second wife Alice, also a survivor. Dr. Drix appeared as a witness in two war crimes trials in Germany; his 1977 testimony in Saarbrucken helped convict a notorious SS guard. In 1991, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his caring treatment of Holocaust survivors. He retired from private practice at the age of 80, and wrote a memoir, Witness to Annihilation: Surviving the Holocaust (1994).