Thread by @RudiGeerts

1/n Robert Clary
was a French-American actor, published author, and lecturer. He is best known for his role in the television sitcom Hogan’s Heroes as Corporal LeBeau (“Frenchie”).

Clary was born Robert Max Widerman in Paris, France on March 1, 1926.

2/n Clary was the youngest of 14 children in an Orthodox Jewish family. At the age of twelve, he began a career singing professionally on French radio and studied art at the Paris Drawing School At the age of 16, Robert Widerman was deported on September 25, 1942 from Drancy by

3/n convoy no. 37 bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. He is one of 209 men aged 16 to 45 selected at Cosel station for forced labor. He stayed for three weeks at the Ottmuth camp before being transferred to the Blechhammer camp where he received, in 1944, the number A-5714 which was

4/n tattooed on his left forearm. The advance of the allies and the evacuation, in January 1945, of the camps dependent on the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, led him, during the death marches to the Gross-Rosen camp then to the Buchenwald camp, number 125 603, where he was released

5/n on April 11, 1945. He was the sole survivor of his family.
"Singing, entertaining and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived,” he said of singing with an accordionist every other Sunday for SS soldiers.

6/n In 1965, Clary was offered the role of Corporal Louis LeBeau on a new TV sitcom called Hogan’s Heroes, and he accepted the role when the pilot sold. The series, which ran from 1965 to 1971, was set in the fictional German POW camp Stalag 13.

7/7 Clary played a prisoner nicknamed “Frenchie” who was a member of an Allied sabotage unit operating from inside the camp.