Walter Stras

Of Blessed Memory 1924 – 1995

Walter Stras was born in 1924 in Steinbach am Glan, Germany. As a young boy he experienced exclusion from school, Kristallnacht, and his father’s imprisonment at Dachau. In the early 1940s Walter was living in Berlin training with other young men for kibbutz life in Palestine. Walter was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 where he performed forced labor for the I.G. Farben Industry at Buna. He was placed on a death march out of Auschwitz in January 1945, making his way to Buchenwald before again being forced into labor, this time for HASAG, at the Altenburg concentration camp. He married a fellow survivor, Malvina, after  liberation, and the couple emigrated to the United States in 1948.