Avraham Krakowski (1918–2011)

Avraham Krakowski was a Chassidic Jew deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz during World War II in 1942, at age 25. He had spent the past two years in the hellish Sosnowiec ghetto. In a stroke of seeming good fortune, he was chosen as part of a specially selected group of 31 Jewish prisoners for a special assignment at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. On arrival, he discovered the assignment was the German ultra-secret "Operation Bernhard" to counterfeit Bank of England pounds notes to undermine the British economy. The team included printers, graphic artists, and accountants like himself. When the Red Army advanced on Sachsenhausen in April 1945, the team of forgers was to be transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and murdered. However, the Germans had only one truck for the transportation, so the prisoners were forced to begin marching on foot. The Germans eventually fled the Allies, leaving the prisoners to their own devices. Krakowski survived and was reunited with his fiancée Pola after the war. In 1994, he published his memoir, Counterfeit Lives, with Avraham Yaakov Finkel. His story was also told in Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters), a German-Austrian film that won an Academy Award in 2008 for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year.