Henry Wuga, survivor and Holocaust educator, dies at 100

Henry Wuga, a Scottish Holocaust educator who survived the Nazi years by evacuation to Britain via the Kindertransport as a teenager, has died at 100, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust confirmed on Sunday. 

Wuga received public tributes from Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, who said he was “devastated to hear of Henry’s passing,” and from Yousef’s predecessor Nicola Sturgeon, who wrote on X that Wuga was “an extraordinary human being.” 

The adopted Scot was born in Nuremberg in 1924, where he enjoyed a typical childhood, attending the local school until Hitler’s rise to power left him ostracized and excluded in the wake of the 1935 Nuremberg laws. Wuga then transferred to a Jewish school, where he was a class below Henry Kissinger. 

As antisemitism came to permeate his environment, however, and Nazis held major rallies near Wuga’s family home, Henry’s mother took him out of school, anticipating the need to flee Germany and earn money abroad. Wuga, then 14, went to work in catering at a kosher hotel in Baden-Baden. 

Following Kristallnacht in 1938, Wuga’s parents lost their business and attempted to flee to the United States, but without success.

In 1939, Wuga was placed on a Kindertransport, a train sponsored by Britain to take Jewish children, unaccompanied, out of Germany. Wuga arrived in Liverpool, where he met his guarantor, a Jewish widow and Baltic refugee named Eta Hurwich, who took him in as a son. 

The next year, as he attended school in Glasgow, he was arrested after letters sent to his parents were classified as correspondence with the enemy. The High Court in Edinburgh declared Wuga a ‘Category A Dangerous Alien’, and he was placed in various internment camps over the next ten months before being released at 16.

Taught limbless veterans to ski

Upon his return to Glasgow, Wuga began working in catering, where he went on to make a living with his wife, Ingrid, a fellow Kindertransportee whom he married when the two of them were 20. 

Henry’s mother survived the war thanks to Catholic neighbors who hid her from the authorities throughout the Nazi years. His father died of a heart attack during an air raid in 1943. Both of Ingrid’s parents also survived the war, having successfully fled Germany to the UK.

In addition to speaking regularly about his experience, Wuga worked as a ski instructor for the British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association, teaching veterans who had lost limbs how to ski, for which he was named a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1999.

Henry’s wife, Ingrid, died in 2020. He is survived by two children, four grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.