From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes by Robert Clary

“I traveled across North America for over 20 years talking to groups so that no one could deny these atrocities ever happened.”Īfter his liberation, Clary returned to the arts - performing in plays, painting, and recording numerous jazz albums. “When I did, the nightmares disappeared,” he said. “I couldn’t talk about what happened for 36 years and had nightmares fearing I was going to be taken away again.”Īfter watching a documentary on a woman’s experience at Auschwitz, Clary began to discuss his experience publicly in 1980. “The rest died on the road along the way.”Įven after American troops arrived at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, and liberated the prisoners, Clary’s Holocaust hell was far from over. “We left Blechhammer with 4,000 people and arrived at Buchenwald camp with less than 1,500,” Clary told me. Then there were the death marches where thousands of exhausted and sick prisoners were forced to march for days in the cold to new camps. They would hang people for nothing most of the time and the beatings were unbelievable.” “The first time I saw a hanging, it was petrifying. The guards, however, were notoriously brutal. “At one camp we would perform every second Sunday while the SS came and watched,” he said. While detained, he and other musical inmates performed for their fellow prisoners. “The noise was unbelievable, so I sang while I worked and that’s how I survived.”Ĭlary had been in the entertainment business in his native France since the age of 12 and never considered another profession. “I was young, so they put me to work in a factory making 4,000 wooden shoe heels a day,” he recalled. When the war ended, he was the only member of his captured family to walk out alive.

In 1942, along with a dozen members of his immediate family, 16-year-old Robert was dragged from his apartment in occupied France and thrown into a series of Nazi concentration camps over three years. Acting is a tough business, and if you’re lucky enough to get work and have the talent, you do your best to make a show successful.”Ĭlary knew about survival. “I didn’t have any problem when my agent told me I was wanted for a comedy series about a Nazi stalag. “We had a great crew and I enjoyed the six years we were together,” Clary told me from his Los Angeles home in 2016 and who played the diminutive Corporal LeBeau. First aired in 1965, the unusual sitcom has remained enormously popular through the years despite the sobering setting in a German POW camp. Robert Clary, the last main cast member of the '60s comedy series “Hogan’s Heroes,” died on Nov.

From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes by Robert Clary