Abraham M. Muhlbaum, a Holocaust survivor and member of the Dutch resistance during World War II who later became a Navy research physicist in the Washington area, died Feb. 19 at a retirement community in Falls Church, Virginia. He was 92.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said a son, David Muhlbaum.
Muhlbaum was born Aug. 11, 1922, in Berlin. His family, which was Jewish, fled to Amsterdam a few weeks before the anti-Semitic Kristallnacht attacks of 1938.
The Germans occupied Holland in 1940, and three years later, Muhlbaum’s father, stepmother and three siblings were sent to a detention camp in the Netherlands. The younger Muhlbaum managed to escape capture by sneaking out of a kitchen window and scaling the rooftops of nearby homes.
He became involved in the Dutch resistance movement and helped other supporters secure shelter and false identity papers.
After learning of an unusual prisoner-exchange program between Jewish inmates and members of a German Christian sect interned in the British mandate of Palestine, he forged a telegram from the British government authorizing his family’s immigration to Palestine.
He was able to secure their safe passage in June 1944, according to a biographical statement he gave to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Months earlier, his family said, Muhlbaum managed to secure passage to France by claiming to be a contract laborer on a German coastal defense fortification called the Atlantic Wall. He was planning to cross the Pyrenees into neutral Spain when he was arrested near the Spanish border.
He concealed his Jewish identity with false papers and was interned as a political prisoner at several prisons and labor camps. He spent eight months at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany until it was liberated by Allied forces in 1945.
After his release, he returned to the Netherlands and received the equivalent of a master’s degree in physics from the Delft University of Technology in 1958. A year later, he immigrated to the United States and found work at Westinghouse Electric and as a research associate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
He began his Navy career in 1968 at the Navy’s Oceanographic Office in Suitland, Maryland., and in 1975 was assigned to the former Naval Surface Warfare Center in White Oak, Maryland. At both locations, he studied underwater acoustics and helped design, develop and test “sonobuoys” — devices that can detect, identify and track enemy submarines and torpedoes.
He retired in 1981 and later tutored students in college-level physics and mathematics at Montgomery County high schools and at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland.
In 1980, he received the Dutch Resistance Memorial Cross for his contributions to the resistance movement. He was chairman of the Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Greater Washington and worked in the survivor’s registry division at the Holocaust museum, where he helped translate documents from Dutch to English.
He was a longtime Washington resident before settling in Falls Church in 2003.
Besides his son, of Bethesda, Maryland, survivors included his wife of 49 years, Henriette Cnopius Muhlbaum of Falls Church; a sister; and two grandchildren.
During a presentation at the Holocaust museum in 1994, Muhlbaum was asked by a student how he found the will to live and survive while imprisoned in the camps.
Smiling, he responded: “Stubbornness.”