Israeli Avraham Harshalom has died. He survived Auschwitz, hiding in Prague

Harshalom was born Adam Friedberg on February 4, 1925, in Pruzany, then Poland, now Belarus. His native language was Yiddish, he also knew Polish and Russian, he studied at the Hebrew grammar school, according to his biography on the website of the Memory of the Nation organization.

During the war, the Friedbergs first had to move to the ghetto in Pružany, which was established there by the Nazis, and later the whole family was deported to the extermination camp in Auschwitz. Avraham worked there in the labor commandos, he was the only survivor of his family – his parents ended up in gas chambers, his older brother also perished in the camp.

In June 1944, Harshalom tried to escape but was caught. Later he got to the camp in Buchenwald and in March 1945 he escaped from the transport together with two other prisoners in Litoměřice. They came to Prague with a freight train with coal and were taken by the Sobotkova family at the railway station in Bubny. She then hid the three young men for two months – first at her home, later in a closed shop in Dělnická street.

In 1963, Jiřina Sobotková received the Righteous Among the Nations award in Israel alongside three rescued men. The title is awarded by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem to people of non-Jewish origin who selflessly helped persecuted Jewish victims of the Nazi regime during the Second World War.

At the outbreak of the Prague Uprising in May 1945, Harshalom joined the fighting, for which he received Czechoslovak citizenship. He started learning Czech in his twenties.

After the war, he studied for three years at the Czech Technical University in Prague, and in Olomouc and Liberec he completed flight training for the newly formed State of Israel, which took place in what was then Czechoslovakia. After the communist coup, he went to Israel, where he served as an army air force pilot and then became a successful entrepreneur in electrical engineering. He named the holding company Ariel for the production of components after the air base where he served.

In 1992, a Czech translation of the book Reborn from the Ashes was published, where Avraham Harshalom tells his remarkable life story. A documentary of the same name was also created based on the book.