Harry Pollak
(1923-2014)
Harry Pollak, born Jindřich Pollak (24 February 1923 – 28 February 2014), was a Czech mechanical engineer and economist of Jewish origin. He left then-Czechoslovakia at 25 and spent most of his life in England, eventually becoming a financial consultant. He was part of the team that helped rescue British car maker Aston Martin from bankruptcy. He worked for IBM, Krupp, and Dunlop. The companies he financially saved also included a Swiss paper mill, a number of heavy manufacturers, and the largest European producer of printed circuit boards.
Life
Harry Pollak was born on 24 February 1923 in Dvůr Semtín, Czechoslovakia. He was born as the only child to a family of landowners. He was able to escape the Holocaust only because his parents sent him to study at a lyceum in Nîmes in 1938. When he was 17, he joined the allied forces in France. He fought against the Nazis during World War II, and was one of the Czech soldiers who laid siege to the German-held city of Dunkirk in September 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harry Pollak” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.