![]() ![]() Clary learned to dance by watching Fred Astaire’s movies and copying his moves. ![]() He spent much of his childhood living in a cramped apartment in a building on the picturesque Île St.-Louis, nestled in the Seine River near the Notre-Dame cathedral, that was owned by a rich widow who provided housing for Jewish families in need.Ī showman from an early age, Mr. The couple had an additional eight children together, including Mr. Clary’s mother, brought six children to the marriage from a wife who had died in childbirth. His father, a tailor who was 15 years older than Mr. His parents, Moishe and Baila Widerman, were from Poland but moved to Paris after World War I. Clary was born Robert Max Widerman on March 1, 1926, in Paris. “That helped me tremendously when I was deported, because automatically, even in the first camp, I started to sing for the people who were there, the prisoners.” Clary recalled in “The Last Laugh,” a 2017 documentary directed by Ferne Pearlstein that explores the role of humor in regard to the ultimate taboo topic, the Holocaust. “That was second nature to me - singing, dancing, clowning around,” Mr. ![]() Clary, who spent nearly three years in German concentration camps during his teens and lost 10 of his 13 siblings, as well as his parents, in the Holocaust.Īfter he was deported to Ottmuth, a concentration camp in Upper Silesia, and eventually to Buchenwald, what helped him survive, he later said, was his skill as an entertainer he would perform song-and-dance routines for other prisoners, and often for SS guards as well. Schultz, fled his home country, Austria, after Germany annexed it in 1938.īut no one involved in the show had a more searing memory of Nazi atrocities than Mr. Klink, and who was the son of the renowned orchestra conductor Otto Klemperer his family fled Berlin for Los Angeles when Mr. They included Werner Klemperer, who played the pusillanimous camp commandant, Col. ![]()
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