According to Shoshana Fisher writing in ‘The Commentator’ – which is the student newspaper of Yeshiva University – Kressel’s story is as follows:
‘On Monday, Oct. 27, Professor Joseph Schwarz’s “The Holocaust” class had the opportunity to hear from Henry Kressel, YU alumnus, former chairman of Yeshiva University’s Board of Trustees, author, Harvard businessman and Holocaust survivor. Schwarz, an adjunct professor at Stern College, teaches a course focusing on the lead-up to the Holocaust and reflects on similarities to the modern day. In this vein, Schwarz brought in Kressel to share his story, saying, “The best way to learn about the Holocaust is by focusing on the lives of individuals who lived through it.”
Kressel told his story of narrow escapes and miracles, sharing his journey of fleeing Germany and hiding in France with a non-Jewish family, until eventually immigrating to America and reuniting with his remaining family. Throughout his story, Kressel emphasized that the only reason he is alive today is because of the kindness of non-Jews who saved him. In a powerful moment, he said, “Yad Vashem honors 28,000 righteous among the gentiles; I owe my life to 5 of them.” As his story unfolded, he explained who each of them was, and between a German soldier, a priest and a French farmer, the only commonality was their willingness to risk their lives to save a Jewish child.
Kressel’s childhood came to an abrupt end at the age of eight, when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, causing his family to escape first to Belgium and then to France. After a short time in France, his family was eventually herded, with the rest of the Jews in the area, onto a line to be placed in cattle cars headed for Auschwitz. While waiting on the line, a French woman, sent by a priest to save as many Jewish children as possible, hurried him and his younger sister off the line. They were rescued, but their older sister and parents were sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
As a part of the priest’s rescue efforts, he arranged for Kressel to be taken in by a French family in the countryside, where he spent the war hiding his Jewish identity. He attended school and lived with strangers, never knowing the fate of his family. Later in life, he returned to the French village where he was recognized by an older woman and struck up a conversation with her. She told him that the whole village had known his secret, but not one had turned him in to the German police. In response to his question of why they would take such a risk to help a stranger, she said, “Because it was the right thing to do.”’ (1)
Kressel’s story is noteworthy because it is extremely vague as well as not a little implausible given that he is basically claimed that after his family had fled Austria in 1938; his family had escaped to Belgium and then onward to France at an unspecified date.
The problem – as is often the case with so-called ‘Holocaust Survivors’ – is that their claimed timeline makes little to no sense in the context of the known facts about German activity around implementing policies regarding the jewish question.
In this instance Kressel is necessarily implying his family fled from Belgium to France ahead of the advancing Wehrmacht forces in May 1940 and was ‘soon after rounded and deported to Auschwitz’. The problem with Kressel’s narrative is that the deportations of jews from France specifically from the famous Drancy internment camp in March 1942 not May 1940.
Indeed, Auschwitz only received its first prisoners (728 Polish political prisoners) on 14th June 1940 as it was at this time conceived of as a conventional concentration camp rather than the massive industrial-prisoner complex it was to become by mid-1944.
This means in effect that either Kressel’s family inexplicably fled from Belgium to France in 1942 – as they were ‘shipped to Auschwitz soon after arriving in France’ – which wouldn’t have been possible unless they were using a resistance escape line (perfectly possible if unlikely) or if Kressel’s timeline is absolute codswallop. Since the earliest he and his family could have been deported to Auschwitz would have been March 1942 and as ‘foreign jews’ (i.e., not from France and not a French citizen) then he and his family would have been some of the first to be deported to work camps.
His other claim that a French woman ‘instructed by a priest’ (presumably Roman Catholic) had run around the ranks of jews at Drancy waiting to board trains for deportation to the East ‘saving jewish children’ is frankly implausible. Since the mass deportations of jews were undertaken under heavy military and police guard looking out for just such attempts to ‘rescue jews’ or breakout/revolt attempts by the jewish deportees. These were military operations often conducted in closed military areas of train stations – a good example of how such an operation would look in practice is provided during the arrival of the Czech SOE agents into Prague’s central station in the film ‘The Man with the Iron Heart’ – and as such wandering women scooping jews and leading them away is almost certainly fantasy invented later.
Kressel’s ‘rescue story’ is simply implausible and overly fantastic, meant to appeal to the emotions and prejudices of the hearers, but it simply doesn’t work with actual history.
Now I don’t doubt Kressel’s basic contention that he was secretly kept in a French village by pro-jewish Christians (likely Roman Catholics) during the Second World War, but I rather suspect the origin of his being in said bolt hole was far more prosaic and boring than Kressel’s current story. One suspects that Kressel’s parents put out feelers to try and get their children hidden somewhere safe because of the rumours about Germans ‘murdering jews’ out of hand – which remember were doing the rounds from the 1930s onwards and have next to no truth to them that I can find (historical context is always vital to understanding an event) – and somehow contacted a ‘friend-of-a-friend’ who was able to help and after some negotiation (as well as possibly some money paid) Kressel and his sister were spirited away to the French countryside sometime between 1940 and 1944 but probably between 1940 and 1942.
Kressel then embroidered this basic story with lots of additional detail that never happened to create his ‘Holocaust Survivor’ story to make it far more interesting than ‘I escaped from Austria and then hid in a French village during the Second World War’ and so created the tissue of nonsense that he is now parroting as ‘what really happened to him’.
References
(1) https://yucommentator.org/2025/11/because-it-was-the-right-thing-to-do-henry-kressels-story-of-courage-and-faith/
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