Robert Clary, an actor best known for playing Cpl. Louis LeBeau in the popular 1960s TV series Hogan’s Heroes, died Tuesday at the age of 96. But Clary was not just a talented performer and the.
Robert Clary, an actor best known for playing Cpl. Louis LeBeau in the popular 1960s TV series Hogan’s Heroes, died Tuesday at the age of 96. But Clary was not just a talented performer and the last surviving member of the show’s original principal cast — he was also a Holocaust survivor.
The New York Post described his remarkable life. Clary was born Robert Max Widerman to an Orthodox Jewish family in Paris, France, on March 1, 1926, the youngest of 14 children. When Clary was 16 years old, the Nazis sent him and his family to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, and there his parents were murdered in the gas chambers.
“‘My mother said the most remarkable thing,’ Clary told the Reporter in 2015 about that day. ‘She said, ‘Behave.’ She probably knew me as a brat. She said, ‘Behave. Do what they tell you to do.’”
And Clary survived — in fact, he was the only member of his family to survive. He was later imprisoned for 31 months at the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp, where the identification number A-5714 was tattooed on his left forearm and he worked in a factory making wooden shoe heels.
