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Inspired Life

Drummer, 98, started band with fellow Holocaust survivors, now tours world

‘We all have to live together in peace, and that’s what I’m trying to promote,’ Saul Dreier said

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January 6, 2024 at 8:05 a.m. EST
Saul Dreier and his Holocaust Survivor Band performing in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, a town in central Poland, in 2022. (Courtesy of Justyna Kołaczek)
6 min

Saul Dreier learned to play the drums in perhaps the most unlikely of places: a concentration camp during the Holocaust.

Dreier, who grew up in a Jewish family in Krakow, was sent to the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp in German-occupied Poland when he was 16, then was moved to a subcamp, where he toiled in a factory called NKF, repairing automobile radiators.