Roman Haar

Born: July 9, 1935, Danzig, Poland

Roman Haar was born in the Free City of Danzig, where his father Salo worked as a salesman. Roman's mother, Ema, converted to Judaism before she married his father. Roman had a half-brother, Joachim Frietsche, from his mother's first marriage. On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland. In December, the Nazis ordered all foreign-born Jews to leave Danzig. Joachim, who was Christian, stayed and moved in with his grandparents.

Roman and his parents moved to Salo's hometown of Rzeszow, Poland. In 1941, all Jewish people in Rzeszow, including Salo and Roman were forced into a ghetto. Ema said she was German and stayed to work as a cleaning woman for the people who took over the Haar's apartment. Roman got smuggled out of the ghetto and sent to his mother. Eventually, the Jewish people in the ghetto were sent to the concentration camp Belzec. Roman's family was killed there. To save her son's life, Ema claimed that Salo was not Roman's real father, and that he was fully German. The German authorities rejected her claim. Ema was told that Roman had to enter the Jewish quarter immediately. Instead, for a year and a half, Roman hid in the apartment where she worked. In May 1944, Ema took Roman to Danzig, where her father lived. A local policeman saw Ema and remembered that she was Jewish, but since the war was close to ending, he did not arrest them. Roman was liberated in Danzig by the Russians in 1945. After a few years in a displaced persons camp, they started a new life in the United States.