Hans Gunther Adler; Wrote of Time in Concentration Camps

Hans Gunther Adler, 78, a scholar and German-language author who wrote about his years in Nazi concentration camps. Born in Prague, Adler studied at Prague’s German University from 1930 to 1935 and became a poet. He tried to emigrate in 1938, but plans fell through and he remained in Czechoslovakia, one of the last of the Prague German-Jewish writers. In 1941, he was picked up by the Nazis and spent several months in forced labor on a railway in Bohemia. He returned to Prague but with his wife was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Adler spent more than three years in various concentration camps including Auschwitz, where his wife died in the gas chamber. After the war, he returned to Prague, where he taught survivors of the camps and built up Prague’s Jewish Museum. He emigrated to London in 1947, married sculptor Bettina Gross and resumed his studies and writing. He won the Leo Baeck Prize, a major Jewish award, in 1958 for his first major book, “Theresienstadt 1941-45.” In London on Sunday of heart failure.