Henry Foner

Henry Foner, né Heinz Lichtwitz, was born to a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. His parents were Ilse and Max Lichtwitz. In 1937, following the death of his mother, he was raised partly by his paternal grandparents. A few months after the Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht, he was sent for safety alone at age six to the UK via train as part of the Kindertransport, a British-organized rescue operation for Jewish children. He arrived on February 3, 1939, in Swansea, Wales, to live with Morris and Winifred Foner, a Jewish couple who cared for him until he was old enough to leave home. He learned English, adopted their surname, and anglicized his first name to become Henry Foner. His father Max died at the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz in 1942. His grandmother was sent to the camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt) and survived World War II. Foner served in the British Army in Egypt and Sudan from 1953 to 1955. He earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Leeds. On a Zionist youth movement trip to Israel, he met his future wife Judith, and brought her back to the UK, where they were married in 1960. In 1968, they moved with their children to Israel, settling in Jerusalem. Dr. Foner worked as an analytical and environmental chemist at the Geological Survey. He had preserved numerous items that his father and other relatives had managed to send him before the war broke out. These included a stash of postcards, written in English and German. Many years later, Dr. Foner turned the material into an illustrated memoir entitled Postcards to a Little Boy, published by Yad Vashem in 2013.