Aba Gefen (1922–2015)

Aba Gefen (originally Weinshteyn) was born to a Jewish family in the small village of Simnas, Lithuania. His father Meir Weinshteyn owned a fabric store, and his mother was a housewife. Aba had three younger brothers, Binyamin, Yosef and Yehuda. He attended the local Jewish elementary school and the Jewish gymnasium (high school) in Marijampolė. He was a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization, and very involved in its activities. After Nazi Germany invaded the region, thousands of Jews were shot by the Germans and their helpers in the Lithuanian paramilitary. Aba was one of the very few who were spared. Those who had not been shot were deported from the town in trucks. Aba escaped into the countryside and hid with a farm family under an assumed identity, helped by his blond hair and blue eyes that enabled him to pass for a non-Jew. He was also helped by his father's reputation as a well-respected shopkeeper and years of friendship with Lithuanians, which induced many to help protect his son from the Nazis and their supporters. Aba not only spent years hiding in barns and farm houses, but also established a network of such safe houses and food suppliers for a number of other young Jews in hiding. He kept a diary nearly every day from 1942 to the end of the war three years later. After the war, Aba worked in Austria with the clandestine Bricha organization that helped European Jewish survivors get to the British Mandate of Palestine. Realizing that he did not have much of a future in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, he emigrated to Palestine himself, earned a PhD degree, and became an Israeli diplomat. He wrote a book about these experiences, published in Hebrew in Israel in 1961, and in English translation in 1973 as Unholy Alliances. He also wrote Israel at a Crossroads (2001) about the history and politics of the country. His Holocaust diary, also published first in Hebrew, appeared in English in 1989 as Hope in Darkness: The Aba Gefen Diaries.