This has certainly been a sad week for daytime television fans. There are new reports that say Days of Our Lives alum Robert Clary, who also starred on The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful, has passed away at the age of 96. Here’s what you need to know.
Days of Our Lives Alum Robert Clary Dies At Age 96
Robert Clary was born in Paris, France and began a singing career at a young age. Robert was also known for his role on Hogan’s Heroes. During the Nazi occupation, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz where his parents died that day in the gas chambers. He was a Holocaust survivor, coming to the United States in 1949 to continue his entertainment career.
“My mother said the most remarkable thing,” Clary told The Hollywood Reporter’s in 2015. “She said, ‘Behave.’ She probably knew me as a brat. She said, ‘Behave. Do what they tell you to do.’”
That said, Robert didn’t want to talk about his Holocaust experience until well over 40 years after it had happened. “For 36 years I kept these experiences during the war locked up inside myself,” he once said. “But those who are attempting to deny the Holocaust, my suffering and the suffering of millions of others have forced me to speak out.”
In May 1945, Robert returned to France and briefly sang in dance halls. It wasn’t until four years later did he try his hand at Hollywood. He left France for Los Angeles and in 1950 appeared in a French comedy skit on a CBS variety show. And the rest, as they say, is history. And while Robert did play roles in various daytime television shows, it was his role on Hogan’s Heroes that made him a household name.
Robert Clary Made A Name For Himself On Hogan’s Heroes
“I had to explain that [‘Hogan’s Heroes’] was about prisoners of war in a stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps,” he wrote in his 2001 memoir, “From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes.”
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