Early life Zygmunt Shipper was born on 18 January 1930 in
Łódź, Poland into a Jewish family. When he was five years old, his parents divorced. As they were an
Orthodox family, divorce was disapproved of, so he was told that his mother had died. Shipper had a happy childhood and was raised by his father and grandparents. In Łódź, he attended a Jewish school.
Persecution by the Nazis In 1939, at the beginning of
World War II, his father became aware of the increasing persecution of the Jews by the Nazis and fled to Russia. He believed that the danger only applied to Jewish men, not children or the elderly.
Łódź ghetto Between November 1939 and April 1940, the entire Jewish population of Łódź was transferred to
Łódź ghetto. Due to the increased scarcity of food, Shipper's grandfather quickly died from malnutrition in 1942. Death in the ghetto was commonplace. Shipper recalled stepping over dead bodies at the age of ten. Like other Jews in the ghetto, he was forced to work. He worked in a metal factory producing munitions. He continued to live in the squalid ghetto until 1944, when the ghetto was liquidated and the Nazis transferred the inhabitants on overcrowded
cattle trucks to
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many of the occupants died of dehydration on the journey. The people who were not fit enough to work, (the women, children, elderly and disabled) were gassed to death within the hour. Initially, he found settling in difficult because he missed his fellow survivors, but found new friends at the Primrose Club, a Jewish youth club for Holocaust survivors in
Belsize Park in London. He made his first return visit to Auschwitz in the 1990s, accompanied by his two daughters. England captain
Steven Gerrard described his story as, "very moving and very inspirational for us." In January 2015, at the age of 85, Shipper made a return visit to Auschwitz, accompanied by
ITN News. On 18 July 2017, he and his friend Manfred Goldberg visited
Stutthof concentration camp alongside the
Prince and
Princess of Wales, where he spoke to them about his experiences there. In 2021, Catherine, Princess of Wales met with Shipper and Goldberg to mark
Holocaust Memorial Day.
King Charles III commissioned a portrait of Shipper and six other survivors in 2022 for an exhibition titled
Seven Portraits: Surviving the Holocaust; the portrait is part of the
Royal Collection., which was displayed in
Buckingham Palace in 2022. In 1981, he had a heart attack and the doctors did not think that he would survive. His wife responded that she was not particularly concerned, as the Nazis had tried to kill him for five years. The Prince and Princess of Wales, Prime Minister
Rishi Sunak and
Lord Ian Austin were amongst those who paid tribute to him. In the
2016 New Year Honours Shipper was awarded a
British Empire Medal for his work educating people about the Holocaust over the course of 20 years. On
Holocaust Memorial Day 2026, holocaust survivors and their families were at
Buckingham Palace with
Charles III. The King was re-showing the
Seven Portraits: Surviving the Holocaust that he had commissioned of holocaust survivors. == References ==