Paris – Expressions of respect and loss are flowing out of Paris following the news on Monday that Holocaust survivor and former advisor to U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Samuel Pisar, died in New York at the age of 86.
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AFP (http://yhoo.it/1MsWffn) reports in making the announcement French Jewish community leader Roger Cukierman called Pisar “one of the rare very well-known” Holocaust survivors and was saddened to have lost a “friend.”
The Polish-born Pisar, whose parents and sister were killed during the Holocaust, was deported at age 13 and survived stints at Majdanek, Dachau, and Auschwitz before escaping at age 16 during a Nazi death march.
Pisar, who is stepfather to current U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, became a highly respected international attorney for the United Nations in both New York and Paris, while also serving as an economic and foreign policy adviser to President John F. Kennedy.
Pisar also authored the critically acclaimed memoir “Of Blood and Hope” documenting his Holocaust experience.
French President Francois Hollande said, “To ensure that the blood spilled became, in his words ‘blood of hope,’ Samuel Pisar dedicated his life to the pressing task of passing down what he had experienced.”
On his State Department website (http://1.usa.gov/1IG94mP) U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry expressed condolences for Tony Blinken and his family, while praising Pisar and saying that “Of Blood and Hope” will “stand forever as testimony to humankind’s greatest confrontation with evil.”
In his statement of condolences to Blinken and his family, Vice-President Joe Biden remembered Pisar as a courageous man, who “confronted not only the brutality of his experience but the person he had to become to survive.”
A true Jewish hero, z”l.