Itzhak Katzenelson

• Name — Itzhak Katzenelson • Born — 1 July 1886 • Birthplace — Karelichy, Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire • Died — 1 May 1944 • Place of death — Auschwitz-Birkenau, German-occupied Poland

Soon after his birth Katzenelson's family moved to Łódź, Poland, where he grew up. He worked as a teacher, founding a school, and as a dramatist in both Yiddish and Hebrew, starting a theatre group which toured Poland and Lithuania. Following the Invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939, he and his family fled to Warsaw, where they were trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto. There he ran an underground school for Jewish children. His wife and two of his sons were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp and murdered there. Katzenelson participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, starting on 19 April 1943. To save his life, friends supplied him and his surviving son with forged Honduran passports. They managed to leave the ghetto but later ended up in Germans hands as part of the Hotel Polski affair. He was deported to a detention camp in Vittel, France, where the Nazis held American and British citizens and nationals of other Allied and neutral countries, for possible later prisoner exchange. In Vittel, Katzenelson wrote "Song of the Murdered Jewish People". He put the manuscript in bottles and buried them under a tree, where it was recovered after the war. A copy was sewn into a suitcase handle and later taken to Israel. In late April 1944, Itzhak Katzenelson and his son Zvi were sent on a transport to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they were murdered on 1 May 1944.