George Brady - Biography

George Brady, O.Ont (born February 9, 1928, Nové Město na Moravě, Czechoslovakia) is a Holocaust survivor of both Theresienstadt (Terezin) and Auschwitz (Oswiecim, Poland), who became a Canadian businessman and was awarded the Order of Ontario.

Early life and the Holocaust

The son of Marketa and Karel Brady, and brother of Hana Brady, George Brady lived an ordinary childhood in interwar Czechoslovakia until March 1939, when Nazi Germany took control of Bohemia and Moravia. After that, his Jewish family encountered increasing restrictions and persecution by the German occupiers. By the year 1942, Brady's parents had been separated from their children and sent to prisons and concentration camps. They perished in Auschwitz before the end of the Second World War. George and Hana stayed with an aunt and uncle (the uncle was not Jewish, and thus the couple was a "privileged" mixed marriage and not subject to deportation) for a short time until they too were deported to Theresienstadt, a ghetto-camp not far from Prague, Czechoslovakia where he shared kinderheim L417 with around forty boys including Petr Ginz and Yehuda Bacon.

George and Hana remained in Theresienstadt until 1944, when they were sent in separate convoys—George to the work camp and Hana to Auschwitz, where she died. George survived Auschwitz because of his trade as a plumber. After learning that his family had perished, he resettled in Canada.

Life after the Holocaust

Brady has made a living from the plumbing trade, which he learned in Theresienstadt. He established a plumbing company with another Holocaust survivor in early 1951 in Toronto, where he now resides. He later married and became a father to three sons and a daughter, Lara Hana Brady.

Order of Ontario

In 2009, he was made a member of the Order of Ontario. That same year, Larry Weinstein's movie Inside Hana's Suitcase premiered and won several festival awards.

Notations

• Karen Levine, Hana's Suitcase—A True Story. Albert Whiteman & Co., Morton Grove, IL., 2003

External links

• Online chronicle