We mourn the loss of Eric Hitter

13 March 1927 - 10 May 2024

Eric Hitter came from the Romanian city of Oradea. Eric, who was called Imre until his emigration to the United Kingdom in autumn 1945, was one of eight children in a Jewish family of factory owners.
From spring 1944, Imre Hitter, his parents, four sisters and younger brother were forced to move to the Oradea ghetto with thousands of other Jews from the city and the surrounding area. More than 27,000 of them, including the family of eight, were deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp between 23 May and 27 June 1944, most of them murdered shortly after their arrival.
Seventeen-year-old Imre Hitter was classified as fit for work by the SS and sent to the Groß-Rosen concentration camp for forced labour. When the camp was disbanded at the end of February 1945, Imre Hitter was one of 3,059 prisoners deported to Flossenbürg in goods wagons. The men were already so weakened that 200 did not live to see their arrival in Flossenbürg. As the Allied troops drew closer and closer, the SS forced him on a death march towards Dachau on 16 April. On the way, the train with the prisoners was shot at near Schwarzenfeld by American planes, which disabled the locomotive and killed numerous prisoners. A few days later, Imre Hitter managed to slip away from the marching column unnoticed. He was liberated in Neunburg vorm Wald on 23 April. Apart from him, two of his older sisters survived.

Imre Hitter spent the next few weeks in hospital in Neunburg, where he only slowly regained his strength. When he learnt in late summer that young people under the age of 16 were being allowed to emigrate to the United Kingdom, he decided to join this group, but had to falsify his date of birth to do so. In his new home, he met his future wife, whose family came from Belgium. After a few years in London, Eric and Fay Hitter moved to Antwerp with their daughter Marylin, where Eric Hitter took a job in his father-in-law's family business. Eric Hitter last visited the Flossenbürg memorial in April 2023.

Our thoughts are with Eric Hitter and his family at this time, to whom we extend our sincere condolences.