Henry Upfall was a survivor among survivors, not only making it through the Holocaust,  but going on to outlive many of his friends and acquaintances who defied death during the Nazi regime.

On Tuesday, Upfall, who lived at the Meer Apartments at the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield, passed away. He was vibrant even in his final months. Earlier this year, Upfall wanted to organize a card game at Meer.

In the weeks leading up to his 101st birthday on April 14, Henry Upfall was hoping to start a men’s poker night at Meer Apartments in West Bloomfield, where he lives," wrote Stacy Gittleman in a story on her blog that also appeared in the Jewish News. "Just returning from spending the winter at his condominium in Florida, he missed his regular poker game at the clubhouse, and the ladies at Meer won’t deal the men into their game."

On Thursday, his funeral was held at the Hebrew Memorial, where two rabbis from Temple Israel, Paul Yedwab and Jennifer Kaluzny,  delivered eulogies, speaking of a man whose spirit not only survived the Holocaust, but blossomed and became a quality to be admired. He was humble and polite and he loved to be social, the rabbis said.

He found joy in his family and friends and mankind, said Rabbi Yedwab, noting that "he coped with the very dark past of surviving the Holocaust. "

Upfall was born in Warsaw as Gedalye Augustowsk, according to the Holocaust Memorial Center website.

His father was a tavern keeper who emigrated to America in the 1920s, leaving his son to be raised by his mother and grandparents in an orthodox Jewish environment.  He had one sister, Rosa.

Stacy Gittleman writes in her blog:

He was an athletic teenager and an avid  boxer. For a time, he traveled from town to  town competing in boxing tournaments,  where he eventually suffered an injury to  his right eye causing permanent blindness  in it. When retelling even a few sentences  of his story, that eye swells shut under the  weight of its tears.

“We had good lives,” Upfall said. “We  were well dressed. My sister never left the  apartment without a fine hat on her head.”

He went on to become a barber. He married Dora Rajf on Sept. 7, 1939, six days after the invasion of Poland by Germany.  The Polish government ordered him and other men to the east to fight the Germans. The Polish army didn't fare so well, and not so long after, he returned to get his wife. 

The Holocaust website stated:

He and his wife returned to Bialystok which was under Russian jurisdiction.   From there they were sent to Vologda Chajkoski Posolek, a labor camp near the town Vologda, to work under Russian military guards, in the forest harvesting trees.  Conditions at the camp were very poor, the men slept on the floor and were given little food, but had to perform hard labor.  A son was born in 1941. 

When the opportunity arose he and his wife escaped from the labor camp and stayed in a town in what is now Belarus, where he worked as a barber.  When Germany invaded Russia in 1941 they moved to Tashkent in Uzbekistan.  There he accepted a Russian passport and was placed into the Russian army.  While being shipped North he deserted, found refuge with a brother in law, and obtained bogus papers which made him again a Polish citizen.  He and his wife then found refuge with his wife’s parents who had moved to Kazakhstan.  There he worked as a barber and his wife as a beautician.

After the end of WWII he and his wife and son went back to Poland, first to Cracow, then Warsaw, where they were spirited out of Poland by Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement, and taken to Vienna, Austria.  A daughter, Dina, was born in Vienna in 1947.  From there they went to a DP camp, Muenchenberg, in Germany.

In 1949, Mr. Upfall and his wife emigrated to the United States where he joined his father in Detroit, Mi.  After receiving his license, he operated a barber shop.  He became a US citizen in 1954.  

He operated a barber shop at 9 MIle Road and Woodward in Ferndale.

His wife Dora died in 2002 after 63 years of marriage.

He was the father of Dina Pinsky of Bloomfield Hills and and the late Yale Upfall.