Avraham Tory (1909–2002)

Avraham Tory was born Avraham Golub to a Jewish family in Lazdijai, Lithuania. He was a young Jewish lawyer and Zionist activist living in Kovno (Kaunas) when Nazi Germany invaded his country in World War II. On June 25 1941, the first 1,500 Jews of Kovno were murdered by Lithuanians, and Tory began keeping a daily diary in Yiddish. He was appointed secretary of the Jewish Council of Elders (Ältestenrat) in the Kovno ghetto. Working with others, including his future wife Pnina Sheinzon, he secretly collected reports, armbands, German orders, and artwork, which he buried with his diary in five wooden crates. In January 1944, as the ghetto was being liquidated, he managed to escape and hid for four months in a tiny barn in the small village of Vir Vagalai. When liberated by the Red Army, he returned to the ruined ghetto, where he succeeded in recovering three of the five crates. He then left the precious documents with a trusted friend and embarked on the long journey by which he reached Palestine in 1947. The diaries were later smuggled to western Europe and from there to his new home in Israel. Of the surviving diaries written in the European ghettos of the Holocaust, Tory's was the longest by an adult. The material he saved is of great importance as an account of World War II Lithuania, a country in which more than 90 per cent of its Jews were murdered. His memoir, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, was published in English in 1990.