The Story of Eric Strach 1914-2011
Eric Strach was born into a close-knit and loving Jewish family in Brno, Moravia in 1914. His father owned an umbrella shop and he had an elder sister, Ilse, whom he loved dearly.
Eric studied in Prague, where he qualified to become a doctor in 1938. He was on holiday in France in August, when he was warned not to return to Czechoslovakia. In 1940 he joined the newly formed Czech Army in exile and travelled with them from France to the northwest of England.
During this time however, his family had been deported to Terezín, then on to concentration camps where they were murdered. This included his sister’s two young children aged six and four. Eric had tried desperately to get them out of Czechoslovakia to join him in France but every embassy he visited had turned him down. Although this failure left him with ‘survivor guilt’ for the rest of his life, his hugely optimistic outlook enabled him to make the best of his life, a new family and a successful medical career.
In 1990, Eric was able to return to what was now the Czech Republic and spent his later years memorialising his family and the murdered community of which he had been a part. Thus he finds ‘continuity’ which is the theme of this talk. He was committed to speaking the truth about what happened in the Holocaust.
Using slides of video clips from testimonies her father gave to the Association of Jewish Refugees and the Shoah Foundation, letters and personal and historical photographs, his daughter, Angela, recounts Eric’s experiences during the war, how he was able to avoid being swept away to the camps like the rest of his family, and how he finally settled in England and made a new life for himself.
Presented by Angela Strach
Angela is retired secondary school teacher. She believes in the importance of live theatre; she acts and directs with an amateur dramatic society, sings in a choral society and started learning violin in retirement.
She thinks that Holocaust Education is necessary in combatting hatred between different sections of society, with divisive wars raging and sectarian hatred and violence escalating. She sees herself and her family as responsible for keeping these stories of the past alive.
Angela wants her father’s story and his family’s fate to be heard because we must never give up trying to learn from the past and striving to make a better world.
Watch an excerpt from the story of Eric Strach
