Henry Orenstein

Henryk Orenstein was born in Hrubieszów, Poland, on 13 October 1923. Because he was Jewish he was deported from his town and survived five Nazi concentration camps; his parents were driven to a cemetery with other Jews and shot. He reached the United States as a refugee, went into toys, and held more than a hundred patents. In 1984 he saw Japanese transforming robot toys, secured the rights and shaped them into Transformers for Hasbro — a line still in production forty years on. He later invented the hole-card camera, which by letting viewers see the players' cards turned televised poker into a spectator sport. He wrote a memoir of the camps, I Shall Live.