Yisrael Gutman, a world-renowned scholar of Holocaust studies, was born in Warsaw in 1923. His parents and older sister perished in the city's Jewish ghetto created by the Nazis, and his younger sister was a member of Janusz Korczak's orphanage.
As a member of the Jewish Underground in the Warsaw Ghetto, Yisrael Gutman was wounded in the uprising. From Warsaw he was taken to Majdanek, and from there to Auschwitz. In May 1945 he was sent on the death march to Mauthausen, which he somehow survived. In total, he spent two years in the camps. After the war he helped in the rehabilitation of survivors, was active in the Bericha movement - an organized effort to help Jewish Holocaust survivors, mainly from Eastern Europe, to reach new homes, especially in Palestine - and immigrated to the Holy Land himself in 1946.
Prof. Gutman has dedicated his life to studying the Holocaust and perpetuating its lessons for the next generations.
Video courtesy of Yad Vashem