Alex Hacker

Alex Hacker grew up in a Hungarian-Jewish family in Budapest. He attended a technical secondary school as a young man. When German troops invaded Hungary in the spring of 1944, Alex Hacker was taken to a camp for Jewish forced labourers in his home city. He was deported to Flossenbürg in November 1944 and to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp a short time later.

At Dora, he was initially put to work on a construction and transportation detail. But he soon developed pleurisy and was admitted to the camp infirmary. After he was discharged, he was assigned to an underground production detail due to his technical training.

He survived and was taken on a clearance transport in April 1945 to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where British soldiers liberated him on 15 April. After receiving medical treatment in Celle and spending a short time in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp, he made his way back to Budapest in the summer of 1945. On 28 August 1945, he was reunited with his parents in the city. He noted the date in his diary, which he had kept since his time in Mittelbau-Dora.

He left Hungary in 1946 and went to Palestine one year later. He studied in London in the 1950s and eventually emigrated to Canada, where he got married in 1959. He and his wife had three children. Together with a business partner, Alex Hacker established a large hotel and managed it until he retired. Alex Hacker now lives with his son in Toronto.

Find out more

Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation (ed.), „… und dann fängt das zweite Leben an.“, Zeitzeugen im Porträt, Begleitband zur Sonderausstellung, Nordhausen 2020.