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August 27, 2004/Elul 10 5763, Vol. 55, No. 49
Holocaust survivors' champion dies at 78
TOBY AXELROD
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
BERLIN - Karl Brozik, a longtime advocate for Holocaust survivors, has died at age 78.
Brozik, a survivor of Auschwitz, passed away Aug. 18 during a visit to Prague, according to the Conference for Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, whose Frankfurt office Brozik had led since 1987. The cause was a chronic heart ailment.
The funeral was held Aug. 22 in Frankfurt. Attendees included German Jewish leaders and representatives from the worlds of politics, social work and the arts.
Mourners on both sides of the Atlantic joined in remembering Brozik as a tireless champion for moral justice for survivors, and as a person who knew how to enjoy life.
"We had kindred spirits," Ben Helfgott, a survivor who is on the Claims Conference negotiating committee, told JTA in a telephone interview from London. "He was an intelligent man, and he knew how to talk to the Germans."
"He was a brilliant negotiator, he was an excellent organizer and manager, he was a man for whom this work was his life," said Saul Kagan, executive vice president emeritus of the Claims Conference, who had worked with Brozik for more than 30 years.
The funeral was a testament to Brozik's broad reach, said Gideon Taylor, the Claims Conference's executive vice president.
He described Brozik as a man able to "grasp the vision while at the same time mastering the details," a skill essential in his negotiations for compensation.
"He touched a lot of worlds. And if you look back on his life, what he has done and achieved in spite of what he went through, it's remarkable," Taylor said.
Despite health problems, Brozik energetically represented the Claims Conference in negotiations for reparations from the German government, Claims Conference spokeswoman Cornelia Maimon Levi said.
"It is really impressive how many people cherished him," Levi said.
Born in 1926 in what is now the Czech Republic, Brozik was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. Deported from the Lodz Ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, he joined the resistance movement in the death camp.
The Nazis forced inmates to leave Auschwitz on foot as the Soviet Army approached in January 1945. Brozik survived the "death march" to Mauthausen, where he was liberated in May 1945.
Brozik returned to Prague after the war, where he worked as an attorney and economist in an export firm, and for the Foreign Ministry of Czechoslovkia.
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