Heinz Prossnitz Undated photo, Yad Vashem archive, Israel.
Heinz Prossnitz, nicknamed Heinzek among his friends, was born in 1926. Like many others, he joined the Zionist youth movement relatively late.
Together with a group of the Maccabi Hatzair movement, named in Hebrew kvuca havlaga, he was involved in various social activities. After the beginning of the deportations, he helped the deportees with packing and carrying the permitted luggage as part of the so-called relief service. Soon censored postcards began to arrive in Prague from the deportees, in which they asked in a more or less cryptic manner (e.g. "Give our regards to Mr. Loaf") for food .
Together with two girls from the Zionist movement, Erika Wolf and Edith Březina, and with the help of a secret network of collaborators, Heinzek achieved something incredible: From the only post office in Prague from which Jews were allowed to send anything, despite the wartime emergency, he delivered a total of 5,230 kilograms of food to Terezín, 3,120 kilograms of food to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Lodz ghetto, and 600 kilograms of clothing and food to the Sachsenhausen and Hamburg camps. He also sent money, probably raised from American donors, through the Zionist movement's Hechalutz office in Switzerland. Its director, Nathan Schwalb, paid little heed to official orders and prohibitions from the Swiss and American governments - and tried to help.
Heinz Prossnitz did not live to see the liberation. On October 28, 1944, with the last group of employees of the Prague Jewish community to which his father was assigned, he was deported from the Terezín ghetto directly to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was the last such transport; the Nazis needed to get rid of witnesses who knew too much.