As a youngster, Samuel R. Harris survived the Holocaust, making him one of the youngest such survivors of the genocide of European Jews during World War II.
Later in life, Harris was behind the creation of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie, which opened its doors in 2009. He served as the museum’s president from 2002 until 2009.
“A champion for good who inspired people to fight bigotry and hatred, Sam attracted a community of followers built on hope and compassion,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker in a statement. “I was lucky enough to know Sam for nearly three decades as a friend and a leader in building the Illinois Holocaust Museum. Just as he did for countless others and for younger generations, Sam profoundly shaped and enlightened my outlook on the world in ways large and small.”
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Harris, 90, died of natural causes on April 1 at a rehabilitation center in Naples, Florida, according to his son-in-law, Jeff Kreamer. He had been a Kildeer resident.
Born Szlamek Rzeznik in 1935 in Dęblin, Poland, Harris survived unimaginable loss during the Holocaust. On Sept. 1, 1939, Nazis occupied Dęblin, and Harris, whose family was Jewish, was forced to move to a ghetto with his seven siblings and parents. They lived there for almost three years before the ghetto was liquidated in 1942. All of his family except Harris and two of his sisters was deported to the Nazis’ Treblinka extermination camp and ultimately murdered.
Harris survived because his older sister, Rosa, worked as a slave laborer in the concentration camp outside of Dęblin. Rosa hid both Sam and his sister Sara in the camp until they were deported in 1944 to the Częstochowa concentration camp in Poland, where Rosa again hid both Sam and his sister until the Soviet Army liberated the camp in 1945.
Harris told the Tribune in 2005 about the horror he had felt at age 7½ from being crammed into a boxcar to go to a Nazi concentration camp – surrounded by crying, screaming adults – and how those memories persisted.
“The train went slow; when it stopped, we could hear children playing, dogs barking,” he told the Tribune in 2005. “I wished I was a dog, just to be out of there.”
After the war, Harris and other survivors hitchhiked back to Dęblin, only to discover their homes occupied by others. After his sister Rosa married a Viennese man, Harris and his sister Sara were placed in a Polish orphanage, though in 1946 Rosa smuggled them to Austria and arranged for their adoptions by U.S. families. Arriving in New York in 1947, Harris was connected with the Jewish Children’s Bureau, which facilitated his adoption by onetime Northbrook Elementary School Dist. 28 president Harriet Harris and her pediatrician husband Ellis Harris of Northbrook. From there, Harris took on his adoptive parents’ surname.
After graduating from New Trier High School in 1954, Harris earned a bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College in Iowa in 1958. He had a long career in the insurance industry, including at Equitable as a financial planner..
A neo-Nazi group drew significant controversy by proposing a march in Skokie in the late 1970s. Though the group ultimately decided to march instead on Chicago’s Southwest Side – and the entire episode was immortalized in a made-for-TV movie about the incident – the controversy led to area Holocaust survivors like Erna Gans and Allen Zendel working to found the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, establishing the foundation and small museum in a former dental office on Main Street in Skokie. That facility opened in 1981.
Harris’ involvement with the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, which runs the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, began later in life, when he decided to respond to a message from famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
“(Wiesenthal) said, ‘Survival is a privilege which entails obligations,’” Harris told the Tribune’s Ron Grossman in 2005.
As foundation board president in 2002, Harris led efforts to build a new Holocaust museum at 9603 Woods Drive in Skokie, which gained unanimous approval the following year from Skokie’s village board. The effort came about a year after the village had rejected a highly controversial, earlier plan to locate the museum on two acres in a residential area behind a Hebrew day school.
“We think the site was worth waiting for,” Harris told the Tribune in 2003, referring to the museum’s current Woods Drive site. “As we say in Yiddish, it was ‘beshehrt’ — meant to be.”
The museum’s current building, which was designed by architect Stanley Tigerman, was laid out with an eye towards having a “dark side” and a “bright side,” Harris told the Tribune in 2006. The dark side featured the rise of Hitler, descriptions of Kristallnacht — when Nazi youth ransacked Jewish homes and stores in 1938 — and Nazi plans for the Final Solution, or genocide of all European Jews.
However, the museum’s bright side was designed to highlight the creation of the nation of Israel, along with stories of non-Jews saving Jews.
“We would like to stress the goodness of humanity,” Harris told the Tribune in 2006.
In a statement, Bernard Cherkasov, the CEO of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, called Harris “a visionary who saw the need for the museum and committed himself fully to making that vision a reality.”
“His kindness, optimism and unwavering belief in the power of education will continue to inspire generations,” Cherkasov said.
Pritzker, then a billionaire venture capitalist but not yet a politician, chaired the $50 million capital campaign to fund the current Holocaust museum in Skokie, and in so doing worked closely with Harris. Pritzker also later chaired the museum’s board.
After the museum opened in 2009 – it is currently closed temporarily
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for renovations, although the museum also now has a Loop location as well – Harris remained involved, including taping his own survivor story for visitors to watch and allowing the museum to display both his own leather belt from his time in captivity as a child and a high school essay he wrote about America when he was only a few years removed from the camps. Those artifacts have remained on display in Skokie.Harris authored a 134-page memoir in 1999, “Sammy: Child Survivor of the Holocaust.” He was also the subject of a 16-minute documentary film in 2016, “An Undeniable Voice,” that was produced by actress Sharon Stone.
Harris was named to New Trier High School’s inaugural Alumni Hall of Honor in 2011.
Along with his son-in-law, Harris is survived by his wife of 64 years, Dede; a daughter, Julie Kreamer; an adopted sister, Sue Moses Thompson; and two grandchildren.
Information on services is pending.
Update: This story has been updated with new information from Harris’s family, including his date and place of death.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.