Michael Smuss

Michael Smuss (15 April 1926 – 21 October 2025) was a survivor of the Holocaust and an artist. Smuss was the last surviving resistance fighter of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Early life Smuss was born in Danzig, Free City of Danzig on 15 April 1926, to David and Margarete Smuss. When Michael was 6 years old, Nazi Germany took over the city. The Nazis then outlawed Jewish children in the public school system, after which Smuss was removed from his school for being an “enemy of the people.” Smuss's father homeschooled him until they moved to Lodz when Smuss was 12.

In 1939, after the Nazis took over Poland, the Nazis started taking Jews to bring to the Warsaw Ghetto. Due to a misunderstanding of Margarete's passport, Polish authorities assumed she was a German citizen, which allowed her and Smuss's sister, Frida, to find work. Smuss and his father were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto.

Concentration camps and death march German labour contractors went onto the train to request machinery workers, which Smuss volunteered his friends, father, and himself for. They were all transferred to the Budzyń concentration camp. One night the head of the camp, Reinhold Feix, shot Smuss's father after he tried to escape. Smuss was then told that he was at risk due to Feix liking to shoot the family members of the people he killed. Smuss was told to request a meeting with Feix, ask for his dead father's coat, and seem generally disinterested in his father's death. Feix granted Smuss's request, but threatened to kill him if he ever saw Smuss not wearing the coat. The coat was used to smuggle food. which The Times of Israel called "highly-regarded". Both the Polish and German Embassies wrote responses to his death.