Dave Lux, Holocaust survivor and Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust community member, died on Oct. 29. He was 85.
Lux was born on April 12, 1933, in Negrovec, Czechoslovakia, to Mordechai and Esther Pinkasovic, and had an older brother, Yaakov. In March 1939, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, and soldiers forced the Lux family to flee its home. The family resettled in a crowded building with other refugee families.
While living there, Lux said a woman approached the refugee parents to ask who was willing to entrust her with their children. Lux said his parents were the only ones. As he and Yaakov were led away from his parents, Lux recalled the confusion he felt as a 5-year-old, at the sight of his mother crying inconsolably.
What Lux didn’t know at the time is that he and his brother were being sent on the Kindertransport to live in England indefinitely without their parents. The brothers spent the war years in England, where, through limited correspondence, they learned that their parents had a third son, Irwin. However, all correspondence eventually stopped, and after the war ended, the brothers realized that their family had most likely perished in the Shoah.
In 1949, Dave and Yaakov moved to Israel, where Dave served in the military. In 1958, he moved to the United States, where he married Helene, and they had three children, and eventually five grandchildren.
Lux never fully understood the details of his rescue until 50 years afterward, in 1989, when he attended a Kindertransport reunion in England. At the reunion, he discovered that the woman who approached his mother in the resettlement area had been working for Nicholas Winton, the British stockbroker who arranged for the rescue of 669 children from Czechoslovakia to England.
Although Lux had few memories of his parents, and could barely even picture them, he always remembered that his mother was a strong woman, and that his father had a sharp sense of humor. In the last few years of his life, Lux frequently told his story to honor the courage and sacrifice of his brave parents.
Lux is survived by his wife, Helene; daughter Beverly; sons Steve, Danny and his wife, Andrea; and five grandchildren.
