Mark Koperweis

I was born in 1957, just twelve years after Henry, the protagonist in Every Last Jew, was liberated from the Dachau concentration camp. The second of Henry’s three children, I grew up in the small town of East Rockaway, New York, on the South Shore of Long Island.

In this Irish/Italian working-class neighborhood I, along with a small group of my Jewish friends were a small minority. I always felt proud of my Jewish heritage and especially of my father being a Holocaust survivor. I knew at an early age that one day I would tell my father’s story to the world.

Shortly after moving to California in 1984 I started working in the drapery and window coverings industry where I found that working with textiles came naturally to me since I had spent many summers as a teenager working in my father’s garment factory.

Currently I live in Oakland, California, where I am sole proprietor of a successful Window Coverings Installation business called draperyGuru®. I am the proud father of four children. I enjoy playing acoustic drums and electronic percussion in my current band Turnaround Sound. I have traveled to India several times where I studied traditional drumming on the tabla of Northern India and the khol of West Bengal. I also play the bongos and cajon percussion instruments from Latin America as well as the djembe and dumbek from Africa and the Middle East.

My early interest in the religions and philosophies of the Orient led me to study the I-Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, Shrimad Bhagavatam, the Ramayana, and many other writings that form the basis of Hindu and Buddhist teachings. After my first trip to India in 1977 I decided to teach myself how to read, write, and speak Hindi. In more recent years my studies have focused on both modern and ancient Jewish history.

Recently I became the executive director and co-founder of The Henry Koperweis Foundation for Holocaust Education, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting an awareness of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe as told through Henry’s personal experience. I started this foundation along with my two siblings in 2017.

In the early 1990’s I sat down with my father Henry to record his personal testimony of growing up in Radom, Poland during the time that Adolf Hitler came to power and invaded his country. My father explained how he and his family were forcibly torn from their home and moved to a ghetto, then systematically forced to work in various labor camps, and eventually were separated and deported to death camps.

Over the years I have transcribed over six hours of videotape to compile this current true-to-life publication of my father’s remarkable tale of survival.

I thank you in advance for taking the time to read his account of one of the darkest periods in human history.