Halina Birenbaum

Halina Birenbaum was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, the youngest of three children of Jakub Grynsztajn and his wife Pola. She was 10 years old when Nazi Germany invaded her country in World War II. She spent the war years in four concentration camps; both her parents were murdered. Halina also survived the death march of January 1945 before being liberated by the Red Army. In 1947, she immigrated to Israel, where she worked on a kibbutz until she married Chaim Birenbaum in 1950. She and her husband have two sons. She lectures and meets with Israeli youth, sharing her firsthand knowledge of the Holocaust. She has collections of poetry and several books about the Holocaust, including her memoir Hope Is the Last to Die, first published in Polish as Nadzieja umiera ostatnia in 1967.