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My father, Joe Klein, who has died aged 83, after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, spent nearly 50 years in the hotel and restaurant business in Kent, in the Margate area, most notably running a Jewish hotel at the height of the resort's popularity in the 60s and 70s.
Joe was born in Lask, a small village in Poland, and was nearly 12 years old when Germany invaded. His father was taken away for labour and the rest of his family rounded up and put into the Lask ghetto. In August 1942, Joe's mother and his younger sister Rosa were taken away to Chełmno concentration camp. Joe and his older sister Sara went to the Lodz ghetto to join labour gangs. Just before the ghetto was wound up in August 1944, Sara got appendicitis. They both ended up in Buna (a sub-camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau) where Joe continued to work, but Sara, due to her illness, was not so lucky. He never saw her again.
On New Year's Eve 1944, Joe and the other survivors in Buna began the march to another camp, Dora, in the Harz mountains, a journey of some four to five weeks, in freezing weather. There they were put to work loading V-bombs for transportation. After only a few weeks, Joe was transported to Belsen. He was so weak when the British liberated the camp in April 1945 that he was unable to get up from the bunk where he lay.
Finding that his family were all dead, he decided to go to Israel to fight in the 1948 war of independence. After the state of Israel was created, he trained as a Cordon Bleu chef in Switzerland. Back in Israel he met and married my mother, Toby, and in 1954 they settled in Britain. In 1962 Joe took over the Carmel hotel in Cliftonville, a rather genteel suburb of Margate, renaming it the New Carmel hotel. Toby died in 1999; Joe is survived by his three sons, Leslie, Harold and me.
