Born in the Polish shtetl of Swieciany (now Svencionys) in 1926, the great historian of the Holocaust Yitzḥak Arad died in Tel Aviv on May 6. Arad, himself a survivor of the Shoah, was the director of Yad Vashem from 1972 to 1993, and authored several important historical works on Hitler’s war against the Jews. Joseph Berger tells his story, beginning with his teenage years in a Nazi ghetto:
[Arad] survived, at first as a forced laborer—cleaning captured Soviet weapons in a munitions warehouse—and then, sensing what fate awaited, by smuggling weapons to partisans in the nearby forests and forming an underground movement in the ghetto. He, his sister, and their underground associates eventually stole a revolver and escaped, meeting up with a brigade of Soviet partisans.
Acquiring the lifelong nickname Tolka (diminutive for Anatoly), he took part in ambushing German bases in what is now Belarus and setting up mines that blew up more than a dozen trains carrying German soldiers and supplies. Among his exploits was a battle with pro-German Lithuanian partisans in fields and forests covered in deep snow in the village of Girdan.
A Zionist since childhood, Arad made his way to Palestine, [where he] joined the fight for an autonomous Jewish land, serving with the Palmaḥ, the elite fighting force that was eventually incorporated into the Israeli army after Israel declared its independence in 1948. Assigned to an armor brigade, he rose to the rank of brigadier general, retiring in 1972.
He was among the first scholars to study the Jewish partisans in the forests and the ghettos and the systematic murder of Jews by killing squads as the German Army moved deeper into Soviet territory. . . . Arad remained active with Yad Vashem until his last weeks.
Read more on New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/obituaries/yitzhak-arad-dead.html