William H. Donat

William Donat was born in Poland in 1937. Germany invaded Poland when he was one-and-a-half years old, and shortly thereafter his parents and he were confined to the Warsaw ghetto established by the German occupiers. He is one of a handful of young children from the Warsaw Ghetto to have survived.

When he was five, he was smuggled out of the Ghetto and given to Christian friends of his parents. Shortly thereafter, he was betrayed and had to spend the remainder of the war in a catholic orphanage. Meanwhile, his parents were sent to various concentration camps where they spent the remaining two years of the war. Fortunately, both survived and the family was reunite after the war.

Immediately after World War II, he was brought to the United States where he grew up in New York City. He attended public schools and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1956. He received a B.A. in French language and literature from Colgate University in 1960. After graduation he was married, and went on active duty with the U.S. Army.

His professional career was spent in book publishing and in graphic arts. He simultaneously devoted much of his time working pro bono as an editor, and then as the Chairman of the non-profit Holocaust Library, which published fifty-six books about Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe. He is currently a member of the Editorial Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and an active speaker for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

He recently participated in the editing of the republished version of Alexander Donat's The Holocaust Kingdom, which is his father's classic wartime memoir of their family. He subsequently participated in a series of fundraising events where he was the keynote speaker for the publisher, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

He and His wife Ellen have been married for forty-one years and lived in Westchester County, N.Y. They have three grown children and four grandchildren.

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