Beni Virtzberg (1928–1968)

Beni Virtzberg was born in Hamburg, Germany, to a Jewish family. His parents were Gabriel Gustav, a merchant born in Poland, and his wife Rachel, a university graduate and homemaker. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, his father was expelled to Poland, and Beni and his mother followed. They went to live with an aunt in Sosnowiec in southern Poland. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in World War II, they were forced into the Jewish ghetto in the Środul district. In 1943, the ghetto was liquidated and they were sent to the death camp at Auschwitz. Beni’s mother was killed upon their arrival; 14-year-old Beni and his father were separated. Beni asked one of the Nazi officers nearby to let the two of them stay together -- that officer was Josef Mengele, who supervised the selection of prisoners in the camp. Mengele spared the father’s life, and Beni was assigned to work in the camp hospital where Mengele conducted his notorious experiments. For several weeks, he served as Mengele’s personal servant. In January 1945, with Red Army troops approaching, the Nazis forced those prisoners still alive at Auschwitz into a death march westward. Beni’s father was too ill to walk, and when he finally collapsed, he was shot and killed by the Germans in front of his son's horrified eyes. When the war ended, Beni spent a few months in in Italy before immigrating to Israel, then the British Mandate of Palestine. There he was taken in by members of Kibbutz Givat HaShlosha, where he trained for service in the Palmach, the elite fighting force of Haganah, the underground army organized by Jews. He joined the Palmach in 1948 and fought in some of the fiercest battles of Israel’s War of Independence. In 1950, Beni married Rachel Issachar (Bashari), a fellow Palmach fighter with whom he had two children. He worked for the Jewish National Fund as a forester, and later directed the research department for the Southern region forestry operation. During his tenure there, he developed the Liman irrigation system, a technique inspired by Nabataean irrigation methods. Beni Virtzberg was among the first in Israel to write an autobiographical account of his experiences in the Holocaust. He began writing his book, Migei Hahariga Lesha'ar Hagai (From the Valley of Slaughter to the Gate of the Valley) in the wake of the 1961 Eichmann trial, when court testimony by survivors prompted Israelis to finally begin to speak openly about the painful subject. His book, published in 1967, did not meet with commercial success and was eclipsed by the flood of books that were issued following Israel’s victory in the Six Day War. On August 4, 1968, Beni shot himself in his family home. At his funeral, Rabbi Eliyahu Kushelevsky eulogized him by saying, "Eichmann killed him 25 years ago. But we only received the body today." In 2017, the book was published in English by Yad Vashem as From Death to Battle: Auschwitz Survivor and Palmach Fighter.