Tom Kremer

Thomas Kremer was born in Cluj, Transylvania, on 26 May 1930. He owed his life to the Kastner train: Rudolf Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann for the release from Auschwitz of some 1,600 named Hungarian Jews, and Kremer was number 907 on the list. The train was diverted to Bergen-Belsen and then Switzerland, where he and his mother were liberated in January 1945. He went to Palestine and fought for Israel's independence, then settled in England and worked in games design. At a Nuremberg trade fair in 1979 he saw a small unregarded item in a backwater section of the hall, understood what it was, and licensed the Rubik's Cube to the Ideal Toy Company — the firm the Michtoms had built on the teddy bear. By 1983 it had sold some 300 million. He co-founded Winning Moves Games, and at eighty founded the publishing house Notting Hill Editions to revive the essay.