France’s Representative Council of Jewish Institutions (CRIF) announced Bulwa’s death on Thursday, saying he died on Saturday, Oct. 18.
“We are deeply saddened by the death of Armand Aron Bulwa, a Holocaust survivor,” CRIF said in a statement quoted by AFP.
Born on Dec. 27, 1928, in the Jewish quarter of Piotrków Trybunalski, Bulwa lost nearly his entire family to the Holocaust; he recalled that of about 80 relatives, only two cousins survived. After World War Two began, he was confined to the Piotrków ghetto, sent to Częstochowa in late 1944, and then deported to Buchenwald in early 1945. His mother and three-year-old brother were killed at Treblinka.
At Buchenwald’s liberation, the 16-year-old Bulwa weighed 28 kilograms. He was brought to France with several hundred other children and teenagers through a children’s aid program.
Bulwa later said he refused to have children for the first 14 years of his marriage.
“I told my wife that it was a crime to bring a child into the world after going through such hell,” AFP quoted him as recalling. The couple eventually had a daughter who became an obstetrician-gynecologist.
“She gives life, while life was taken from all my loved ones. I think that’s good,” Bulwa said, according to AFP. In 2020, he took part in events marking the 75th anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation.
(jh)
Source: PAP