Alfred Hirsch (Hebrew: פרדי הירש; (1916-02-11)11 February 1916 – (1944-03-08)8 March 1944) was a German-Jewish athlete, sports teacher and Zionist youth movement leader, notable for helping thousands of Jewish children during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in Prague, Theresienstadt concentration camp, and Auschwitz.

Because of his German extraction, charisma, and careful appearance, he was able to convince SS guards to grant privileges to the children, including exemptions from deportation and extra rations, which saved their lives at least temporarily.

According to some accounts, he committed suicide in order not to have to witness the deaths of his charges; alternately, he was poisoned by Jewish doctors who would have been killed if an uprising had broken out.

He moved to Dresden in 1934, where he worked as a sports instructor for Maccabi Hatzair[1] and probably attended lectures at the German College of Physical Education in Berlin.

[b] According to German historian Dirk Kämper [de], the author of the first biography of Hirsch, he may have also been motivated to escape the increasing persecution of gay men in Germany.

[10] Funded by the Zionist World Federation, Hirsch organized local Maccabi Games and set up youth and adult groups for physical education.

[11] Until 1940, Hirsch organized an annual youth camp at Bezpráví [cs; es; sk], where children and teenagers exercised and learned Hebrew.

[18] After the Nazis banned Jews from public spaces, Hirsch organized a playground at Hagibor, in the Strašnice district of Prague, for Jewish children to exercise.

Based on the teachings of Zionist youth movements,[25] Hirsch insisted on maintaining self-esteem, discipline, regular exercise[26] and strict hygiene—even holding cleanliness competitions[27]—in order to maximize their chances of survival.

[14] The youth leaders tried to maintain the children's education despite this being prohibited, teaching a wide range of subjects including Hebrew, English, mathematics, history, and geography.

[30] Hirsch persuaded the Germans to allocate space for a play area inside the concentration camp, where he frequently oversaw athletic activities.

Czech gendarmes guarded the perimeter and kept the children strictly segregated from the rest of the camp under threat of severe punishment.

In any event, he managed to jump over the wire fence separating the Białystok children from the rest of the Theresienstadt prisoners, but he was caught and arrested by a Czech guard.

Hirsch recruited adult prisoners who had been involved in education at Theresienstadt and persuaded the guards that it would be in their interest to have the children learn German.

In fact, the teachers taught other subjects, including history, music, and Judaism, in Czech, as well as a few German phrases to recite at inspections.

[45] A chorus rehearsed regularly, a children's opera was performed, and the walls of the barracks were painted with Disney characters by Dina Gottliebová.

[45] SS men who directly participated in the extermination process, especially Dr. Josef Mengele, visited frequently and helped organize better food for the children.

[53] Hirsch also convinced the Germans to hold roll call inside the barracks, so the children were spared the hours-long ordeal of standing outside in all weather.

[9][h] Zuzana Růžičková, who had also arrived in December, entered into the children's barracks without authorization in order to obtain work as a carer, but was caught by an SS man.

[58] By imposing strict discipline on the children, Hirsch made sure that there were no acts of violence or theft, otherwise common in concentration camps.

[51] He was extremely strict about the children's hygiene, insisting that they wash daily even in the frigid winter of 1943–44 and carrying out regular inspections for lice.

[61][62] Arrivals to the family camp were marked "SB6"[63]—a cryptic abbreviation that the resistance movement in Auschwitz eventually decoded as referring to Sonderbehandlung ("special treatment").

[67] Rudolf Vrba, the clerk of BIIa,[68] visited Hirsch on 8 March to inform him about the preparations for the liquidation of the family camp and to urge him to lead an uprising.

[19] According to some survivors,[j] Hirsch requested a small dose of a tranquilizer to help him calm down, but the Jewish doctors poisoned him to prevent him from leading an uprising, which they feared would compromise their own chances of survival.

[72][74] On the night of 8 March, a strict curfew was imposed and the Jews in the quarantine blocks were loaded in trucks and driven to the gas chambers.

[19] According to postwar testimonies, Hirsch was "a man of extraordinary courage" and "for the children a God",[30] although some of his adult colleagues dismissed him as arrogant, shallow, dictatorial, or vain.

"[76] Czech Jewish harpsichordist Zuzana Růžičková worked as a teacher's assistant at the children's barracks at Auschwitz and credited Hirsch for saving her life.

Fredy Hirsch was a man, he had his faults, he was not a saint, but he was righteous—a tzadik—and so we hope that when the last of us who knew him have passed away, future generations will stand before this tablet and say: 'He must have been a good, brave and beautiful person'.

[82] Historian Anna Hájková, investigating the relationship between Hirsch and Mautner, writes that theirs was "one of the rare queer life stories that can be reconstructed for the Nazi era".

[m] Hirsch is the rare exception to the absent or anonymous gay Holocaust victim because he worked with children and teenagers, who lived long enough to tell the truth about him.