Auschwitz survivor Henri Kichka dies of coronavirus

Henri Kichka, one of Belgium's last Nazi Holocaust survivors and autobiographical author, died of COVID-19 on Saturday in Brussels at the age of 94, according to Belgian media.

Kichka was born into a Jewish family in Brussels in 1926. In 1942, he, along with his family, was forced to leave Brussels when the GermanNazis invaded and occupied Belgium.

After arriving at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, he and his father were forced to work as slave laborers, while his mother, two younger sisters, and aunt were brutally killed.

In 1945, the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz, and Kichka became one of the few survivors of the camp and the only survivor of his family.

For years, Kichka never spoke of his experience, but later on, he began to speak out in the hope that people would remember the tragic history.

In 2005, 60 years after the end of World War II, Kichka published his autobiography "Une adolescence perdue dans la nuit des camps (My Teenage Years Lost in the Night of the Camps)."

(Cover image: Germany's President Frank-Walter Steinmeier lays a wreath at the Death Wall of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, January 27, 2020. /AP)

(CGTN)