Henia Bryer

Henia Bryer is a retired educator from Bloemfontein, South Africa. She was born in Radom, Poland, and is mainly known for her testimony about the Holocaust and Israel's War of Independence. She is the subject of the BBC documentary Prisoner Number A26188: Henia Bryer. Bryer was interned in several concentration camps, and several family members were killed by the Nazis during the Second World War. She celebrated her 100th birthday in 2025.

Holocaust testimony Bryer was born in Radom in Poland on December 10, 1925, and was 14 when Germany invaded Poland. She survived the Radom Ghetto, the Krakau-Plaszow camp, Majdanek, Auschwitz, and the Death March to Breslau and Bergen-Belsen. She described thinking she would die of cold during her three months in Auschwitz, in the snow with very little clothing, but another inmate, a former employee of her father, recognised her and gave her clothes taken from another prisoner who had been killed.

Bryer described the depiction of the Krakau-Plaszow camp in the movie Schindler's List as "toned down." According to Bryer, the Germans would sometimes drain prisoners of blood, to use for transfusions for their troops on the Eastern Front. "There were shootings and hangings and there was no crematorium there - only a hill where they used to burn the people and all the ashes used to fly over us." She also described the cruelty of women guards at Krákau-Plászow, characterising Elsa Ehrich as having "eyes like glass, steel. And she always smiled when she hit somebody, a real sadist."

A few days before Auschwitz was liberated by the Russian army, Bryer and thousands of other prisoners were forced on a death march, eventually ending up at Bergen-Belsen. She described Bergen-Belsen as atrocious even in comparison to Auschwitz, with bodies being left to decompose where the people had died. She contracted typhus there. She was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

Post-war After the war, Bryer and her mother stayed as war refugees in a United Nations displaced persons camp and in Paris, until illegally emigrating to Mandatory Palestine in 1947.

Bryer says an important lesson is how the prisoners all helped each other. "I'm not a victim anymore. I'm a free person. I put a distance between it...you can't live with hatred and grief." based on stories Bryer told Miller-Rothbart. A video documentation of her testimony is part of the permanent display at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre.