Obituary: Frank Bright

“Jews and Czechs knew what the Germans were capable of,” Frank recalled. In September 1938 the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia and closed the Czech schools, Bright attended the Jewish school and took private Czech lessons. The blond-haired teenager, who did not look Jewish, wore a Czech flag in his lapel to ward off danger. He celebrated his bar mitzvah amid an atmosphere of “fear, prohibition and rules” in Czechoslovakia. When Jewish schools were also closed in July/August 1943, he worked in a cemetery, always aware of the dangers of mixing with “Aryans”. Many young Jewish people felt depressed and demoralised. They sensed their youth had gone. Some joined the Zionist organisation – only too conscious, as he saw it, that no country wanted them.

Denied access to newspapers or the radio, they lived on rumours. Hearing of the 1943 Allied landings in Sicily raised morale, despite the war continuing for a further 22 months. On the night of 12 July, 1943 the Brichta family were sent in a locked train compartment to Terezín, the Nazi transit camp.

Frank worked first in the vegetable garden outside the ghetto, and later in the metal workshop making hinges for doors and windows. He sometimes managed to salvage food scraps for his mother, whose job was mending sheets. This proved essential as workers had a second “meal” each day, in contrast to the sick or elderly, such as a Berlin aunt who had to survive on one meal and died within weeks. His father Hermann, worked in the timber yard, but when ghetto police were sent to reinforce security at Auschwitz at the start of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, his father became one of the ghetto’s new, older policemen.

By autumn 1944, some 1,500-2,000 people were transported to Auschwitz every two or three days, including his maths teacher, leaving the ghetto half empty. Frank’s last birthday treat of a tiny Oetker jelly hidden by his father evoked bitter-sweet childhood memories. But then his father, too, was sent to Auschwitz. There had been no chance to say goodbye. Just two weeks later he and his mother followed.

On arrival they were separated into two lines: those “declared fit for work” and those destined for the gas chambers. What happened next would haunt him for the rest of his life, and was reflected in his eyes. It was watching his mother led to the gas chambers.

“My mother spotted me, broke ranks, came over to me, shook hands with me and went back,” said Mr Bright. “I saw her go along this ramp and at the end of it, was turned left... and that was the last time I ever saw my mother.” Later he wondered which of the flames was his mother.

“I realised I was on my own and I wasn’t prepared for that. I always depended on my parents. Their loss hit me very hard. At first it didn’t sink in.” It forced him into a premature adulthood. Five days after seeing his mother for the last time he was sent in a cattle truck to a factory in a village in the Sudetenland border region, as a slave labourer at a propeller factory. He wore clothes made from Jewish prayer shawls and wooden clogs. The civilian manager wanted a mathematician to make vital calculations. Bright earned 20 pfennig (pennies) for a 12-hour shift working on various components and tasks. It appeared the mathematics teacher had saved Frank’s life, though not his own. The young Frank recalled the stench of death and the awareness of people having the power of life and death over you – which made it “hell on earth”.

Bright was rescued in May 1945 by French labourers. When the Russians arrived, he said, “they ignored the Jews”, and, having no idea where he wanted to go, he returned to Prague where he was cared for by the Red Cross. He worried about his six wasted years with minimum education, and no means of earning a living. However, he obtained an apprenticeship with Carl Zeiss Co, manufacturer of precision optical lenses, in Teplice in the Czechoslovakia.

Then a distant Viennese relative in London paid the £500 guarantee and plane ticket for him. He arrived in London in 1946, carrying his mother’s typewriter, and studied shorthand, typing and English before working in a Kentish Town heavy machinery workshop. Ever resourceful, he studied in evening classes for nine years, training as a civil engineer. He moved to Canada, and returned to the UK to work with local authorities, including Suffolk County Council.

He met and married Cynthia with whom he had two daughters and they moved to Martlesham Heath, near Ipswich. He never returned to Germany or the Czech Republic, and felt “partly alien/partly British”. He said his Jewishness stayed with him as a burden he could not get rid of, regarding British Jews as “living in their own world”. The Association of Jewish Refugees, rather than synagogue affiliation, became his main Jewish link. He told the movement he felt vaguely Jewish, but it was his survivor status that inspired him to trace the fate of his schoolmates from the class of 1942. He regularly gave talks in schools and was appointed MBE in recognition of his work with school children in Queen Elizabeth II’s final New Year’s Honours List. He said: “Making future generations aware of the events of World War Two and the Holocaust is so important.” Cynthia predeceased him in November 2021 just weeks before he was awarded his MBE. He died after a short illness. He is survived by his daughters.

“I loved him very much,” said his daughter Miriam Bright, “and I will obviously miss him very much. We shared a sense of humour.”

Frank Bright: born 1 October, 1928. Died 16 August, 2023 .