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Kurt Thomas was born in the city of Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1914. He grew up in Boskovice, a small town with a famous medieval Jewish quarter. Kurt was drafted into the Czechoslovak Army, where he received military training.
After the Munich agreement of 1938 and the subsequent creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by German occupiers in 1939, Kurt was forced to return home. Soon after, a forced residence territory for Jews was created in the former Jewish quarter of Boskovice, and then, in 1942, Kurt and his family were deported to the ghetto in Theresienstadt. They did not stay there for long. After a few months they were deported to the East, through Trawniki and on to the Piaski ghetto in occupied Poland. One of the jobs Kurt performed while there was farm work for the Polish Podsiadly family. In November 1942, Kurt was deported through Trawniki to the Sobibor death camp, where he managed to survive until the prisoner uprising in October 1943. After escaping from Sobibor, Kurt returned to Piaski, where the Podsiadly family hid him for nine months until liberation. Kurt returned to Czechoslovakia with a Czechoslovak army unit, but decided to leave the country just before the Communist takeover in 1948. With the help of distant relatives, he eventually immigrated to the United States.
The interview was recorded in Boca Raton, Florida in 1997.