[1] Kichka was the only member of his family to have survived the deportation of Belgian Jews to camps in Central and Eastern Europe.

He began speaking on the importance of the memory of those who perished at the hands of the Nazis in the 1980s and spoke widely on his experiences to school audience.

In 2005, published his autobiography, Une adolescence perdue dans la nuit des camps with a preface by the French historian Serge Klarsfeld.

Henri Kichka was born in Brussels, Belgium on 14 April 1926 into a Jewish family which had emigrated from Poland.

[2] His father, Josek Kichka (Kiszka), had been born in Skierniewice in modern-day Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1898, and fled the country in 1918 as a result of rising Polish anti-Semitism, moving to Belgium.

On 1 August 1942, Kichka's sister, Bertha, received her summons to Mechelen transit camp ostensibly for compulsory labor service in Eastern Europe.

Kichka and his father were assigned to work on a railroad, and his mother, aunt, and sister were killed at Auschwitz on 14 September 1942.

[5][6] Henri Kichka died on 25 April 2020 at the age of 94, eleven days after his birthday, in Brussels as a result of COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium.