George Wolf’s family was drawn to the wild cheering and boom of drums that cascaded through the streets from the direction of Prague Castle on March 15, 1939.
A German soldier heard them speaking to each other in his own language, and with one smiling swoop, he lifted the 11-year-old schoolboy from Brno onto the roof of a military truck.
“Little boy, have you ever seen our Führer?” the soldier exclaimed, pointing to a man waving from a third-floor window in the castle. It was Adolf Hitler.
The soldier did not know that the family was Jewish: They had slipped into Prague a few days earlier to collect exit visas, and would soon flee to the safety of Switzerland.
Mr. Wolf, however, would carry that snapshot, the instant when his country was devoured by tyranny, for the rest of his long life.
“It was a very strange feeling,” said Mr. Wolf, during an interview a few years ago filmed by a friend. “It was the end of the world as we knew it.”
Mr. Wolf, a retired garment manufacturer who was active in The Blue Card, a charity that aids Holocaust survivors, died at the Dawn Greene Hospice in Manhattan on June 28, according to his friends and neighbors. He was 92.
Mr. Wolf was diagnosed in late March with the novel coronavirus, a condition compounded by advanced prostate cancer. Over the next several months, he was transferred between the hospital and a nursing home, eventually settling at the hospice for the last 48 hours of his life, according to four neighbors who monitored his care.
George Egon Wolf was born on Nov. 16, 1927, to Egon Wolf, a prosperous textile merchant and Social Democrat, and his wife Trudy, in Brno, a southern Czech city then home to a flourishing community of around 12,000 Jews.
After Berlin fell, Mr. Wolf headed to Nuremberg, where he served as a translator during the war crimes trials. In 1946, at 19, he boarded a ship to New York, where he started his business and married Beth Horelick, a gifted pianist.
Mr. Wolf was a voracious reader, a keen listener and a witty conversationalist who surrounded himself with artists, musicians, dancers and poets. Above all, he embraced the role of neighbor, and he opened his 16th-floor apartment on Central Park West, with its panoramic views of the park, to friends, many of them fellow tenants he had met in the laundry room or lobby.
Sarah Grunstein, a concert pianist, moved there four years ago. When she opened her front door, she found a notecard from Mr. Wolf that read, “I hear you are a concert pianist and love cats. Welcome to the building. I too love music, the piano, and cats.”
Another neighbor and friend, Joey Smith, a choreographer and teacher, remembers Mr. Wolf as puckish and oblivious of his age. He drove his Mercedes into his 90s, and got a special kick out of parking it wherever he liked, thanks to a handicapped permit still registered to his wife, who had died in 2015 at 85.
The day before Mr. Wolf died, Ms. Grunstein performed an audience-of-one recital for him that he watched on a propped-up iPad. She planned to deliver another performance the next day, this time looping in several of their mutual friends, on Zoom.
Mr. Wolf died about an hour before she was scheduled to start.
The show went on. Ms. Grunstein began by reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, tuneless and grave, quite unlike the man being honored.
She quickly moved on to one of his favorite Bach works, the lilting opening Aria of the Goldberg Variations.
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George Wolf, Caring Neighbor Who Once Glimpsed the Face of Evil, Dies at 92 - The New York Times
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