Frank Bright, one of the last Jewish Holocaust survivors remaining in Britain, dies aged 94

Any peace the family might’ve experienced in Prague was swiftly ended by Czechoslovakia’s secession of the Sudetenland to Germany. Most of the six Jewish families in the flats where Bright’s family lived perished by 1942. 

He recalled hearing the Gestapo knocking on doors during home-to-home searches, and the terror he felt at that ominous sound. 

Though Bright was still able to have a bar mitzvah, he called the atmosphere in Czechoslovakia then as ‘one of fear, prohibition, and rules.’ 

In 1943, Bright’s family was transported to Theresienstadt ghetto in a locked train compartment. 

There, Bright lived in the boys’ quarters and worked in the vegetable garden outside the ghetto, then later worked in the metal workshop. 

Though he could not go to school, he was tutored in mathematics by a teacher in the ghetto. 

“Every 2-3 days, transports took 1500-2000 people to Auschwitz, leaving the ghetto half empty,” he recalled to the AJR. 

On Bright’s final birthday at the ghetto, he found a sweet that his father had hidden him as a treat. Soon after, his father ‘disappeared’, and Bright never saw him again.  

In October 1944, he and his mother were transported to Auschwitz. When they arrived, his mother was directed to the left, and Bright to the right.  She died in the gas chamber that day, and Bright was left wondering ‘which of the flames was my mother’. 

Bright, meanwhile, was sent in a cattle truck to a factory on the outskirts of the Sudetenland region. There, his mathematics skills were used in the calculations required to construct aeroplane propellers. 

Bright recalled that the mathematics teacher from the ghetto had, in a very real sense, saved his life. 

As liberation drew nearer, Bright was forced to dig trenches in the frozen earth to bury Jews who had perished in the notorious death marches. 

At last, in 1945, Bright and others who had been abandoned were rescued by French labourers who unlocked the gates and turned off the electric wire fence around the camp. 

After his liberation, Bright returned to Prague temporarily until a distant relative living in London offered to pay for his journey over. 

He arrived in the UK in 1946 carrying his mother’s typewriter which he had miraculously kept in his possession and, following several years of education, Bright eventually became a civil and municipal engineer.

In 1956, he married an English woman, Cynthia, with whom he moved to Martlesham Heath near Ipswich and had two children. Cynthia passed away in 2021. 

Since the Second World War, he has shared his story countless times at schools around Suffolk and Essex.

In 2019, Frank said: "It means a lot to me to be able to tell my story to young people.

"It is important that they understand what has happened in the past - and these are things they can't really understand just from reading a book."

Michael Newman, chief executive of the AJR, said in a statement: “Frank, who survived Auschwitz and came to Britain after the liberation, took night classes to become a civil engineer and dedicated much of his life to educate young people about the horrors of discrimination, hatred and genocide.” 

Bright was awarded an MBE in 2022 for his services to Holocaust Education. 

A statement from the Holocaust Educational Trust expressed sadness at Bright’s passing. They said: “Frank was unwavering in his determination to honour the memory of those who perished and spoke to schools and other organisations across the UK for many years. 

“Frank always showed a very poignant example of all that was lost during the Holocaust whenever he shared his testimony – a photo of his 1942 school class on which he had indicated the many young children who never survived the Nazi occupation. 

“We are grateful to Frank for all he did to educate the next generation about the horrors of the Holocaust. May his memory be a blessing.”