nd the war itself. At the age of 101, he is the last of the World War II German U-boat commanders and one of the last living German submariners.
6 David Stolier
The Last Living Survivor Of The Struma Disaster
In 1936, with his home country of Romania increasing their persecution of Jews, the father of David Stolier decided it would be best to evacuate his son from the country. He booked David passage on the Struma, an old cattle boat that was barely seaworthy, bound for the assumed safety of British Palestine. Badly overcrowded, with almost 800 passengers and crew, the Struma barely made it to the port of Istanbul, Turkey. The ship sat there for two months while the Turks refused to allow the passengers to disembark and the British refused to grant them visas to reach Palestine.
Years later, Stolier would recall the awful conditions on board the Struma. Hundreds of passengers baked in the sun with no room to move and little water or food. In February 1942, the Turks finally forced the Struma back out into the Black Sea with nowhere to go. Within hours, a Soviet submarine patrolling for Axis ships mistakenly torpedoed the Struma only a mile off the coast. Out of 769 Jewish passengers, including 75 children, David was the sole survivor. Seventy-two years later, Stolier is still the last living witness to this historic tragedy.
5 Harry Ettlinger
The Last Monuments Man
Not every old man gets the opportunity to meet George Clooney, let alone see his World War II story told by the A-list actor and director in a major motion picture. But 88-year-old Harry Ettlinger has accomplished that and much more in his long life. He also holds the distinction of being the last of the Army unit dispatched to Germany to save the looted art masterpieces the Nazis had hidden away in caves and . . . other places.
For those who don’t want to wait to watch Clooney’s The Monuments Men, the trailer is above. At the very end of World War II, the Allies were afraid the Germans would destroy unknown numbers of priceless and historic artwork they knew the Nazis had seized when they came to power at the start of the war. The question was, where was the art hidden and could they rescue it in time? To that end, the Allies dispatched a small unit of art historians, professors, and other Indiana Jones characters called the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives corps. They were tasked with finding and recovering the stolen art the Nazis had stashed in castles, salt mines, and other locations. Almost 70 years later, only Harry Ettlinger survives to attend the Hollywood premiere of the movie made to tell the tale of this remarkable World War II mission.
Ettlinger, a German Jew who had the good sense to flee Germany in the 1930s, would return to Europe at the very end of the war to help recover the artwork, much of it stolen from German Jews. Ettlinger and his comrades would recover a total of over 900 works of art. After the war, he went home to Newark, New Jersey and helped his country fight the Cold War by working for a company that designed nuclear weapons.
4 Sarah Collins Rudolph
The Last Living 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Survivor
On September 15, 1963 at 10:22 AM, a bomb detonated in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The bomb was a case of dynamite planted by four Klansmen who had tunneled underneath the front steps of the church. Their cowardly act of domestic terrorism against the African-American church managed to kill four people, all of whom were little girls attending a Sunday sermon. Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—all 14 years old—along with 11-year-old Denise McNair died in a failed attempt to stop the growing Civil Rights movement in the Deep South.
It would take over a decade for authorities to begin to track down the KKK members who planted the bomb. Afterward, these four girls were posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, but a fifth victim of the bombing that day has never been recognized. Sarah Collins Rudolph, younger sister of Addie Mae Collins, is the last injured survivor of th