Despite the horrors he lived through, Kussy never lost his sense of optimism and zest for living.
"There's no other person like him in the world," said Kenneth Waltzer, Michigan State University director of Jewish studies. "He had an optimistic outlook to the end of his days."
Kussy was born in Dresden, and life was good during the Weimar Republic - the period in Germany that immediately followed World War I. His father founded Rheostadt, a leading German technological company that manufactured sophisticated electrical apparatus.
Kussy earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Vienna. He was running the company with his brother when the Nazis took power in the 1930s.
He was arrested during Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," in November 1938, when Nazi thugs rounded up thousands of Jews in Germany and Austria and sent them to concentration camps.
He was released because of his family's Austro-Hungarian citizenship, and they fled to the Netherlands. After the Germans conquered the Netherlands, however, he was arrested again and imprisoned in concentration camps for three years.
As a refugee in Ukraine in 1945, he returned to Germany to reclaim his father's factory. He married his wife, Adelaide, that year. But in 1953, he got word that the East German government was about to arrest him for the crime of being a Jewish industrialist in a communist country. He and his family fled to America and settled in Detroit.
He took a job with Square D, an electrical-equipment company. He became an American citizen and converted to Catholicism.
In 1968, he and his family moved to Philadelphia, where he was director of engineering for ITE Imperial. They lived in Haverford.
