William Tannenzapf (1911–2011)

William Tannenzapf was born to a cultured Jewish family in Stanislawów, Poland. He studied electrical engineering in Prague, Czechoslovakia, graduating in 1936. In World War II, his part of southeast Poland was occupied first by the Soviets and then by Nazi Germany. The Nazis invaded in 1941, moving all the Jewish inhabitants into a ghetto, and later killing the vast majority of them, including his mother, three of his four sisters, and their families. Tannenzapf and his wife Charlotte managed to escape along with their infant daughter Renate. They entrusted her to a Polish family of their acquaintance in a distant village, and spent the rest of the war in hiding themselves, first in a nearby village and later in the woods. After the war, the three were reunited and fled continuing anti-Semitism in Poland to a displaced persons camp in Germany. There Tannenzapf organized a school for children and courses to help the adult survivors obtain jobs. In 1948, the family emigrated to Canada, settling in Hamilton, Ontario, where he worked as an engineer for Westinghouse. He also taught evening and weekend courses for World ORT for many years. His short book, Memories from the Abyss, was published in 2009 in the same volume as But I Had a Happy Childhood by his daughter Renate Krakauer, as part of The Azrieli Foundation Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs.