Michel, Ernest W., 1923-

Ernest W. Michel was born to a Jewish family in Mannheim, Germany in 1923. In November of 1938, Michel’s father was arrested during the deadly Kristallnacht pogrom. Michel’s family tried to get him out of Germany and into America, but without relatives in the United States, he couldn’t get the required affidavit of care needed to obtain a visa. In 1939 Michel was sent to the first in a series of 11 concentration and Nazi labor camps, among them Buchenwald, Birkenau, Dachau, and Auschwitz in which he spent the following six years. While in the camps, Michel met and became close friends with two other prisoners. Together, they managed to survive the selection process at the different camps to which they were sent. After almost six years as a slave laborer, Michel and his two friends were able to escape a forced march when the Berga camp in Germany was evacuated in advance of the Allied forces in 1945. Soon after the war ended, he learned that none of his family had survived.

After working briefly for the United States Military Government, he became a special correspondent for the German News Agency DANA at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. From less than 20 feet away, Michel watched as the heads of the Third Reich, including Herman Goering, were tried for war crimes. The byline on his articles, which were published in all the German newspapers, was Ernest Michel, Auschwitz Survivor # 104995 and he became known as the Holocaust Survivor Journalist.

In 1946 Michel arrived in the United States as a displaced person, brought over with help from the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) under the Truman Refugee Relief Act. He went to Chicago and then to Michigan, where he spent a short time as a reporter and columnist for a small-town newspaper. A local college in Michigan invited him to speak about his experiences in Nazi Germany. He began speaking at various local organizations and was given a news column where he could discuss his thoughts about being a new immigrant. The UJA hired him as a speaker and, starting in 1947, as a member of staff. In 1967 Baron Elie de Rothschild invited Michel to France in order to help organize the French UJA, which he continued to do until 1970. He was the executive vice president of the UJA-Federation of New York from 1970 to 1989 and later the CEO of UJA-Federation-New York, the largest citywide fundraising organization in the country. After his retirement, he maintained his connection with UJA, serving as a consultant and speaker, mainly about Nuremberg and what he learned from that experience.

Michel was the initiator and chairman of the highly publicized World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Israel in 1981, which brought together, for the first and only time, 6,000 survivors and their families from 23 countries and four continents. In 1995, he successfully negotiated with the Mormon Church for the withdrawal of almost 400,000 names of Jewish Holocaust victims from the church records who were posthumously baptized by the Mormon Church. As a direct result of his initiative, U.S. Senator Orrin G. Hatch, U.S. Congressman Benjamin A. Gilman and Tom Lantos introduced a resolution in both Houses of Congress which “deplores the persistent and malicious efforts by persons in this country and abroad who deny the historic reality of the Holocaust.”

His critically acclaimed autobiography Promises to Keep, was published in 1993.

From the guide to the Ernest W. Michel, papers, 1698, 1938-1996 (bulk 1946-1987), (American Jewish Historical Society)