The horrors inflicted by the Nazis on millions can feel distant, but Holocaust survivors carried those memories into the present. Now, another remarkable voice from that generation has fallen silent.
Yehuda Aharon Widawski, one of Israel’s oldest Holocaust survivors, has died at 107. He survived Auschwitz and Nazi forced labor, lost much of his family, and later devoted decades to preserving the memory of Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust.
Born in 1919 in Turek, Poland, Widawski moved to Łódź as a teenager. After the Nazi invasion, he and his family were imprisoned in the Łódź Ghetto. On August 29, 1944, the final transport from the ghetto arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. His parents and brothers were murdered, while Yehuda and his brother Yehoshua survived the selection.
The brothers were later sent to the Friedland forced labor camp, where prisoners assembled aircraft wings. Widawski eventually became an informal leader among the prisoners and helped devise ways to protect them from punishment. He was liberated by Soviet forces on May 9, 1945.
After the war, he married and rebuilt his life, immigrating to Israel with his family in 1950.
In 1978, he returned to Poland searching for his grandmother’s grave. Instead, he found devastated Jewish cemeteries and began a lifelong mission to restore them. Using historical records, he helped identify and restore more than 3,000 graves in Łódź and worked to preserve Jewish cemeteries and sites across Poland.
In 2012, he lit a torch at Israel’s official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem.
Widawski often described his greatest revenge against the Nazis simply: they lost, while Jewish life continued.
He lived to see five generations of descendants.
His life stands as a testament to survival, remembrance and the enduring importance of preserving the history of those the Nazis tried to erase.