Historian fought Nazis as a partisan
Director of Yad Vashem for 21 years
Yitzhak Arad, the Holocaust historian, who has died aged 94, was the director of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial from 1972 to 1993.
At the end of July 1941, German troops entered Arad’s native town of Swieciany in Lithuania, which had a Jewish population of 3,000. Fifteen-yearold Yitzhak, along with a small group of young people, managed to escape and fled to neighbouring Belarus.
The Jews who were left behind in Swieciany were taken to an isolated military camp and shot; only 250 skilled workers survived, forced to work for the German invaders.
A few months later, Arad returned to Swieciany but was captured by the Germans, along with 10 of his friends. “I thought they would shoot us, because we didn’t have any documents,” he later recalled, “but, instead, they took us to a location outside town where they gathered confiscated Soviet weapons and ordered us to clean the weapons.”
On the first day, Arad put a small gun under his shirt, not sure whether he would be able to smuggle it away, which he did. By the end of the month, as he recalled, “I and my friends … started an underground group.”
Soon after, Arad and his friends left for the forest and met up with a contingent of Soviet partisans called the “Markov Brigade.”
They attacked trains transferring German supplies and ammunition, and also raided Lithuanian villages, to hunt down those collaborating with the Germans.
In May 1948, Israel declared independence, and Arad, joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) fighting an Arab invasion.
Arad continued to serve in the military as a career officer and, at the same time, enrolled as a student at Tel Aviv University. He took a BA in History and Political science, and, in June 1968 he was awarded an MA in Holocaust Studies.
In 1972, asked by then Deputy Prime Minister, Yigal Allon, to take over Yad Vashem. He served as director for the next 21 years. At the same time, he continued his studies, completing a PHD in 1974. After retiring from Yad Vashem in 1993, Arad taught Jewish history at Tel Aviv University.
Yitzhak Arad married Michal Finkelshtein in June 1948, during a lull in Israel’s War of Independence. She died in 2015. They had three children.