This week: the widow of Dr Seuss and a veteran of the Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazis
THE widow of children's author Dr Seuss, Audrey Geisel, who has died aged 97, was longtime overseer of his literary estate. Dr Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Geisel, died in 1991 and two years later Ms Geisel founded Dr Seuss Enterprises.
Numerous publishing projects followed, along with the Broadway show Seussical. Ms Geisel also served as executive producer for some film adaptations of his work, most recently The Grinch, which came out last month.
She was a Chicago native whose parents broke up when she was young and who ended up as an adult in the middle of two broken marriages. She and Theodor Geisel, who was 17 years older, were both married to others when they began an affair in the 1960s.
Theodor Geisel's first wife, Helen, killed herself and Audrey Geisel sent away the two daughters she had with her first husband after she and the author married in 1968.
"They wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them. He's the man who said of children, 'You have 'em and I'll entertain 'em,'" she told The New York Times in 2000.
"Ted's a hard man to break down, but this is who he was. He lived his whole life without children and he was very happy without children.
"I've never been very maternal. There were too many other things I wanted to do. My life with him was what I wanted my life to be."
Random House Children's Books said Audrey Geisel died peacefully at her home in La Jolla, California.
THE Holocaust survivor Simcha Rotem, who has died aged 94, was among the last known Jewish fighters from the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazis.
Rotem, who went by the underground nickname Kazik, took part in the single greatest act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Though guaranteed to fail, the Warsaw ghetto uprising symbolised a refusal to succumb to Nazi atrocities and inspired other resistance campaigns by Jews and non-Jews alike.
Rotem, who died after a long illness, helped save the last survivors of the uprising by smuggling them out of the burning ghetto through sewage tunnels. The Jewish fighters fought for nearly a month, fortifying themselves in bunkers and managing to kill 16 Nazis and wound nearly 100.
Rotem was born in 1924 in Warsaw, at a time when its vibrant Jewish community made up a third of the city's population. After the Second World War broke out, he was wounded in a German bombing campaign that destroyed his family home. His brother and five other close relatives were killed. Shortly after, the city's Jews were herded into the infamous ghetto.
The ghetto initially held some 380,000 Jews who were cramped into tight living spaces, and at its peak housed about a half million. Life in the ghetto included random raids, confiscations and abductions by Nazi soldiers. Disease and starvation were rampant, and bodies often appeared on the streets.
The resistance movement began to grow after the deportation of July 22, 1942, when 265,000 men, women and children were rounded up and later killed at the Treblinka death camp. As word of the Nazi genocide spread, those who remained behind no longer believed German promises that they would be sent to forced labour camps.
A small group of rebels began to spread calls for resistance, carrying out isolated acts of sabotage and attacks. Some Jews began defying German orders to report for deportation. The Jewish fighters kept up their struggle for nearly a month before they were brutally vanquished.
After the war, Rotem emigrated to pre-state Israel and fought in its war of independence. In 2013, on the revolt's 70th anniversary, he was honored by Poland for his role in the war.
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