Solly Irving was born in Poland was just 9 years old when the war broke out. When deportations from Ryki to Sobibór extermination camp began in May 1942, Solly's father Yisroel Yitzhak arranged for him and his sister Leah to escape. Solly's other sisters Rivka, Hindel and Hendel, together with their mother Chana Necha and Yisroel Yitzhak himself, were all deported. Following their escape, Solly and Leah found temporary refuge on local farms and then with a cousin in the nearby town of Dęblin. However, when they were forced to flee again after the Nazis began the liquidation of Dęblin’s Jewish community, Leah was captured by a Polish farmer; Solly never saw her again, leaving him as the sole survivor from his immediate family.

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Solly spent the next few months hiding in forests, finding food and shelter where he could and constantly fearing discovery, before deciding that he would have a better chance of survival by entering a labour camp for Jews in Dęblin. He spent more than a year in this camp until the advance of the Red Army prompted the transfer of the inmates to another labour camp, in the city of Częstochowa, which Solly was able to survive by gaining a job looking after a guard's rabbits, giving him access to more food. In the last months of the war he and other inmates were transported first, in freezing conditons, to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany in January 1945 and then, as US troops closed on Buchenwald in April 1945, to Terezín (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia; it was here that Solly was finally liberated, by the Red Army, in May 1945. 

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He was one of the first survivors to arrive in England and joined the '45 Aid Society' known as the ‘Boys’. Solly has two children, four grandchildren and many great-grandchildren.