Paul Loewner

Loewner was born Pavel Graf on 16 March 1928 to parents Kamilla and Gustaf in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. 

Loewner was a member of a group of Holocaust survivors known as the Boys, despite the fact the group consisted of over 200 girls. 

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after World War II for rest and rehabilitation.

Members of the Boys were held in Nazi labour and concentration camps and used as slave labourers, they had also survived World War II in hiding or as lone children.

Loewner was the second son of Kamilla and Gustaf Graf, an engineer. After fleeing Prague, they spent several years of hiding in the small towns like Dubrovka until the Nazis tracked them down in the autumn of 1944. His sister had already been hidden in an orphanage.

Loewner’s mother told him to escape through the kitchen window and gave him an arranged address where he could hide until the end of the war. His father was frightened his 16-year-old son would be shot and told him not to flee.

Deportation

Loewner and his father were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. His brother and mother were taken to Auschwitz II-Birkenau where they died.

Loewner was separated from his father on a death march and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp on 27 November 1944 where he spent the next six months. As he tried to grab his father’s hand a guard struck him on his right ear, causing vertigo attacks that would continue throughout his life. He was liberated from Buchenwald by American forces in April 1945 and was cared for by the philanthropist Presmyl Pitter in his children’s homes known as Pitter’s Castles.

Pitter cared not only for Jewish children but for the orphans of German families who lived in Czechoslovakia, who had been brutally expelled after the war. Pitter agreed that a group of his children would be taken for rehabilitation in Britain in the belief that they would then be allowed to settle in the Palestine Mandate. He believed that all of the Jewish children in his care should grow up together on a kibbutz. This condition was either ignored, or not known, to the organisers of the August 1945 airlift from Prague.

Paul Loewner’s Journey 1939-1948

^{Pre-deportation life: Bratislava & Dubrovka, Czechoslovakia. Forced Journey: → Sachsenhausen concentration camp → Buchenwald concentration camp. After liberation: → Pitter’s Castles → Prague, Czechoslovakia → Joins 1st Group of the Boys → Windermere reception centre → Weir Courtney hostel, Surrey, UK.}

A New Life

Loewner arrived in the UK in August 1945 as part of the first group of the Boys. He spent time at the Weir Courtney hostel. His half-sister Maria and her husband Otakar Kraus, an opera singer had fled Czechoslovakia before the war and settled in London but were not able to look after the children.

Kamilla’s brother Karel, by then known as Charles Loewner, was a mathematics professor, and lived with his wife Elisabeth, in Syracuse, New York. Graf went to stay with them and was then adopted by the couple. He studied mathematics at Syracuse University before the family moved to California, where he completed his degree in mathematics at Stanford University, where he was also a postgraduate student. He worked for North American Aviation, before returning to academia to study computer science. He then worked for IBM in New York state. Graf married and lived in Scarsdale, New York. His sister remained in the UK.

Loewner died in 2017.