Beni Virtzberg

In January 1945, with Allied troops approaching, Auschwitz was vacated and its remaining prisoners were forced into a death march in an attempt to conceal evidence of the atrocities that took place there.

After he was liberated, Virtzberg spent a few months in the town of Santa Maria in Italy before immigrating to Israel as part of the Youth Aliyah in November 1945.

There he was taken in by members of Kibbutz Givat HaShlosha, where he trained for service in the Palmach, the military force organized by Jews in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.

During the war he participated in efforts to break the blockade of Jerusalem's Jewish residents, and later he joined in the battles down in Negev Desert, during which four of his brothers in arms were killed.

After his release from the army, Virtzberg married Rachel Issachar (Bashari), a native of Rehovot of Yemenite ancestry who like Vitzberg fought in the Palmach.

Although the Eichmann trial had broken the implicit taboo among Israelis regarding the Holocaust, many survivors, including those who had written for most of their lives, remained uncomfortable committing their experiences to paper for various reasons.

His book describes life in Auschwitz from the vantage point of a minor, and offers a rare perspective on Mengele and his experiments on human subjects.

On the one hand, Virtzberg's narrative challenged the conventional view at the time of survivors as "human dust" who passively accepted the generosity of their Israeli saviours.

How unfortunate it is that even these days, their hard journey has not yet ended, even after being drawn to the source of strength, their lighthouse, whose light drew them from all depths; their blood is laced with memories and echoes that provide them both a burden and an asset.

His case was another example of the dilemma between writing and life described years later by the Spanish writer Jorge Semprún, himself a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, whereby those who wrote about their memories too soon often ended up paying for it with their lives.