Biography
Szlomo Waks is the son of Izhack and Ita Waks. He was born on February 15, 1935 in Krasnik, Poland where his parents owned a small grocery store. They were Hasidim and a small congregation met in their house. Szlomo had four older siblings Natan, Abraham, Josef and Sarah. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the family stayed in their own home for the first two and a half years of the war. In April 1942, Szlomo, his parents, Natan and Sarah were put on a deportation cattle car. Szlomo's mother pushed him out of the car just before the door was locked from the outside, and he went back to their house, like the others for whom there was no room in the train. Word later spread that the deportation train had gone to the Belzec extermination center. For the remainder of the war, Abraham, who worked in the nearby Skrent German labor camp, cared for and protected his younger brother. Szlomo's other brother Josef was taken to the Budzin labor camp, also near Krasnik. Szlomo remained in his home in Krasnik until September supported by relatives during the day and his brother at night upon his return from Skrent. In the fall of 1942, there was a second deportation from Krasnik, and no Jews were allowed to remain in the town except for those who worked in the labor camps. Abraham brought Szlomo into the Skrent labor camp and hid him in his bed. Eventually, Szlomo was caught, but he was allowed to remain in the camp and put to work cleaning and removing garbage. Szlomo and Abraham were liberated by the Red Army in the Krasnik region in August 1944 after they escaped from a foot march of Jewish laborers towards Germany. For the following half-year, Szlomo lived with a Jewish couple in Lublin and afterwards in the Jewish orphanages in Lublin and in Peterswaldau. In December 1945 Abraham brought Szlomo to Germany. They came first to Berlin and from there to Zeilsheim where he participated in the children's center and the Noham Zionist youth movement. In 1947 he went to the Bergen-Belsen DP camp in preparation for his immigration to Palestine. He left Europe for Palestine in April 1948, one month before the declaration of Israel's independence, on board the Argentina. Abraham immigrated separately one week later. Szlomo spent one year in an agricultural boarding school, Mosad Aliyah, in the outskirts of Petach Tikvah. Afterwards, he joined his brother in Tel Aviv working as an apprentice at a radio shop. He later attended an ORT techinal high school, served in the army, studied electrical engineering at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) and earned higher degrees in the United States. He returned to Israel and became a full professor at the Technion.
