Obituary: Manfred Alexander

Manfred Alexander, who has died aged 85, began his working life as a bricklayer in Berlin and ended up as a property broker in New York. During the Holocaust, his bravery, integrity and unique talent for friendship combined to thwart his Nazi captors.

He was born in Berlin, the son of liberal Jews. His father managed a department store that had made uniforms for the Kaiser, but when Hitler became chancellor, Manfred was forced to leave school and abandon his plans to become an architect. At this time he became close friends with my grandfather, a gentile Berliner whom he had met through mutual friends.

In 1941, Manfred was rounded up by the SS and transported with his parents to a concentration camp in Minsk. His mother and father both died there, but Manfred befriended a German railwayman, who smuggled him on to a troop train bringing injured Wehr-macht soldiers home from the Russian front. Hiding in the tender, beneath the coal, Manfred made his way back to Berlin, where he hid in my grandfather’s apartment.

Manfred’s escape from Minsk was a remarkable achievement (he was the only known survivor of this camp, where 50,000 people died, the last 16,000 in one day). But he achieved an even more incredible feat in 1942, when he smuggled his Jewish fiancee Helen Gottberg and her mother through Luxembourg, Belgium and France, and into neutral Switzerland. They crossed the Ardennes on foot, ate in French restaurants under the noses of the SS and hid in a crypt in Besançon (sheltered by a blind monsignor) while German troops burned the town above. Manfred even jumped from a moving train to escape officials who had demanded to see his papers.

As they crossed the Alps (again on foot), they were shot at by border guards, but they finally made it to Switzerland. Here Manfred was imprisoned, but the three were eventually allowed to emigrate to America to join Manfred’s elder brother Gerald, who had fled to New York before the war. Here, Manfred and Helen were married.

The last time I saw Manfred was last year at the Israeli consulate in New York, where, as a result of his testimony, my German grandfather was posthumously awarded the title of Righteous Among The Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance authority. Helen and his brother predeceased him, but Manfred leaves an extended family of close friends.