Former WWII camp prisoner Jack Terry dies at 92

Jack Terry, who survived imprisonment in a succession of Nazi concentration camps during World War II, has died in New York at the age of 92, a spokesperson for the Flossenbürg camp memorial said on Thursday.

Terry was for years the spokesperson for the former inmates of the camp, which lies close to the border with the Czech Republic, and worked to keep alive the memory of the atrocities perpetrated there.

It was important to him "that something remains of this terrible place that should never have existed," memorial spokesman Jörg Skriebeleit said, quoting Terry.

Terry, who was 14 when he was taken to the camp, always rejected being referred to as a "concentration camp survivor" or "eyewitness."

He withdrew from his role as spokesperson for the former inmates a few years ago, saying the political consequences drawn from the Holocaust had not been clear enough and the "never again" cited at commemorative events had become ritualized.

"The world has learned nothing," Terry believed.

He was born into a Jewish family near the Polish city of Lublin in 1930 as Jakub Szabmacher. Following Nazi Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland he was taken to the Budzyń work camp and then to Wieliczka, before being transferred to Flossenbürg, where he was liberated by US forces in 1945.

He was the sole survivor from his family. "While I left Flossenbürg as quickly as I could, Flossenbürg never left me my whole life long," he said later.

After adoption by a US family, he studied geology and medicine, going on to work as a psychoanalyst in New York.

Terry attended the 50th anniversary of Flossenbürg's liberation in 1995, becoming a spokesperson for the former inmates.

He died on Sunday surrounded by friends and family after a brief illness.