Robert Clary, who played “Corporal LeBeau” on “Hogan’s Heroes”. He was “the last surviving member of the show’s original principal cast”. (Kenneth Washington, who joined the show in the final season, is still alive.)
Other credits include “Days of Our Lives” and “The Bold and the Beautiful”.
Noted:
Born Robert Max Widerman in Paris on March 1, 1926, Clary was the youngest of 14 children in a strict Orthodox Jewish family. At age 12, he began singing and performing; one day when he was 16, he and his family were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
“My mother said the most remarkable thing,” Clary told The Hollywood Reporter’s Peter Flax in late 2015. “She said, ‘Behave.’ She probably knew me as a brat. She said, ‘Behave. Do what they tell you to do.’”
Clary’s parents were murdered in the gas chamber that day.
At Buchenwald, Clary sang with an accordionist every other Sunday to an audience of SS soldiers. “Singing, entertaining and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived,” he told Flax.
Clary was incarcerated for 31 months (he worked in a factory making 4,000 wooden shoe heels each day) and tattooed with the identification “A-5714” on his left forearm. He was the only one of his captured family to make it out alive.
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Did Clary have any reservations about doing a comedy series dealing with Nazis and concentration camps?
“I had to explain that [Hogan’s Heroes] was about prisoners of war in a stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps,” he wrote in his inspirational 2001 memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes.
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I can’t find the album anywhere, but the memoir is available from Amazon.
Edited to add: Thanks to Joe D. for his comment, which I greatly appreciate. Also, while I still can’t find the “Hogan’s Heroes” album, Mike the Musicologist pointed out that Robert Clary’s “Meet Robert Clary” (1955) and “Hooray for Love” (1956) are available on Apple Music and Amazon Music.
There’s a dark understory to Hogan’s Heroes.
John Banner, Werner Klemperer, and Leon Askin were all Jews who had fled the Nazis during the war.
Banner’s entire family was killed during the war. He escaped because his acting troupe was in Switzerland during the Anschluss.
I also want to thank Joe, for this information. Though the world might forget, I will never forget. And RIP, Robert Clary. You deserve a well earned rest. May you meet your loved ones, in heaven.