Holocaust survivor who escaped Nazi concentration camp ‘death march’ dies of coronavirus aged 96 in Israel
- Eliezer Grynfeld died in Israel last week, the country’s remembrance centre said
- As a teenager he was taken to the Nazis’ Sachsenhausen concentration camp
- He escaped captivity during a ‘death march’ and later emigrated to Israel
- Learn more about how to help people impacted by COVID
A Holocaust survivor who escaped from a Nazi ‘death march’ during World War II has died aged 96 after being infected with coronavirus.
Eliezer Grynfeld died in Israel last week, leaving two children, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
As a teenager he was imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto in occupied Poland in 1940 and later taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, before escaping when the prisoners were marched west.
After the war he emigrated to Israel and met Pope Francis during a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in 2014.
Holocaust survivor Eliezer Grynfeld (pictured) died in Israel last week after being infected with coronavirus, leaving two children, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren
The Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance centre confirmed that Grynfeld had died with coronavirus, the Times of Israel said.
Born in Lodz in 1923, Grynfeld was forced to move into the Lodz Ghetto with his mother and grandparents after the German occupation which prompted the war.
Both his grandparents died at the ghetto, according to the Yad Vashem centre.
The ghetto was closed in 1944, and many of its inhabitants were sent to die in Hitler’s concentration camps.
Grynfeld was taken with his mother to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp near Berlin, but they were separated on arrival.
The teenage Grynfeld was taken on a death march – the forced evacuation of Nazi prisoners towards the west as the Soviet army closed in on the Eastern front.
Thousands of prisoners died during the marches, but Grynfeld escaped and joined the Soviet forces as a translator.
Eliezer Grynfeld (pictured right) with his wife Rachel, whom he met at a displaced persons’ camp in Germany after World War II
After the war, he spent sometime in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany, where he met his wife Rachel. She survives him.
In 1956 the couple emigrated to Israel, where Grynfeld worked in the military industry and his mother remarried to another Holocaust survivor.
Eliezer was one of six Holocaust survivors – representing the six million murdered Jews – who greeted Pope Francis on a visit to Israel in 2014.
Israel has 13,491 confirmed cases of Covid-19 with 172 deaths, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
Researchers in Israel have warned that the pandemic has sparked a rise in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the crisis.
The researchers said the conspiracy theories were a continuation of an ancient form of anti-Semitism that involves blaming Jews when ‘things go wrong.’