Saul Blau Holocaust Survivor Testimony
Saul Blau was born in 1930 in Tarpa, Hungary, the sixth of seven children in an observant Jewish family. At thirteen, he and his family were torn from their home and deported to Auschwitz, where his parents and younger sister were murdered. On arrival, a block elder pointed to the crematorium chimney and told him his parents had already been gassed and cremated; from that moment, he understood his only task was survival.
Selected for labor, Saul was sent to a coal-mine camp in the Auschwitz industrial complex and endured months of starvation, sickness, and fear. In January 1945 he was driven on a death march to Buchenwald, where U.S. forces liberated him later that year.
After the war, he returned to Hungary to search for surviving relatives before immigrating to Israel. In the new Jewish homeland, he joined the fledgling Israeli Air Force, beginning to rebuild a life from the ashes of his childhood.
Saul remained in Israel for seven years before moving to the United States to reunite with his siblings. There, he met Viola, and together they built a new life — and a family — raising two sons, Robert and Andrew.
