Salamo Arouch, 86, a Greek-born Jewish boxer who survived the Auschwitz death camp in World War II by fighting other prisoners in bloody bouts for the amusement of his Nazi captors and whose harrowing life story was portrayed in the 1989 film "Triumph of the Spirit," died April 26 in Israel. His family said his health had deteriorated after a stroke. Arouch had been a young boxing sensation in his home town of Salonika, Greece, before he was seized by Nazi forces in 1943 and shipped in a boxcar to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Soon, Arouch was boxing two or more times a week as entertainment for German military officials at Auschwitz. "They wouldn't leave until they saw blood," he told People magazine in 1990.
U.A. Fanthorpe, 79, a highly regarded English poet who was first inspired by the human tragedy she saw in a neurological hospital, died Tuesday in a hospice near her home in western England, said her publisher, Peterloo Poets. No cause of death was given.
Eddie Hatcher, 51, who took 19 hostages at a small-town North Carolina newspaper more than two decades ago in a supposed bid to call attention to government corruption, died of natural causes at Central Prison in Raleigh, said a Department of Correction spokesman.
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