Kalman Sultanik

Biography Sultanik was born in Miechów, Poland, on April 12, 1917. During the Second World War he participated in the underground resistance movement against the Nazis before being held in the Płaszów concentration camp in German-occupied Poland and, later, a camp in Dresden, Germany. From there he was forced on a death march to Theresienstadt.

Following his liberation in 1945, Sultanik served as a representative of Holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps at the twenty-second World Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland in 1946. In 1949, he became secretary general of the World Confederation of General Zionists In 1981, while serving as co-chair of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation’s International Auschwitz-Birkenau Preservation Committee along with Auschwitz survivor Ernest Michel, Sultanik organized an assembly of ten thousand Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem aimed at advancing a project to preserve Auschwitz. He also helped raise $40 million from governments across Europe to preserve the site.

Subsequently, Sultanik received a law degree from La Salle Extension University in Chicago, Illinois, and also founded the Confederation House in Jerusalem.

He died on October 14, 2014, in New York at age 97.