He joked that they were going hunting bears in Poland. He had no idea about gas chambers.
Download image
Anthony Bloch was born in Klatovy on 10 October 1933 into a mixed Jewish-Christian family. Due to his half-Jewish origin, he was forbidden to attend school or public spaces during the Nazi occupation. The Nazis sent his father to the Terezín concentration camp in 1944; he survived until the end of the war, but the father’s four siblings died during the holocaust. The father refused the offer to relocate to Israel in 1948. The witness lost his job at a weaving shop after putting an American flag in his lapel during President Edvard Beneš’s memorial service. He studied at technical high schools in Jihlava and Náchod. During his mandatory military service, he played football for teams in Jaroměř, Písek, and Mariánské Lázně. Having returned from the army, he worked in mines in the Jáchymov area and then completed training to become a cooling equipment mechanic. In 1967 he emigrated, following his cousin to the UK, and flew to the US with his wife and son to live with relatives two year later. He worked his way up the ranks to become the chief mechanic at a textiles firm registered in St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. Later on, his wife and he opened and successfully operated a hotel in Arkansas, running a restaurant that served Czech cuisine. Following his divorce, he returned to the Czech Republic in the 1990s and remarried. He was living in Mariánské Lázně in 2023.
