Berish Orbach, a 105-year-old Holocaust survivor who was one of the last people smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto, has passed away in Melbourne, Australia. Until a few months ago, he was still active and fully lucid.
Just last August, Orbach celebrated his 105th birthday in a notable event in Melbourne, attended by friends from across the community. In honor of the occasion, he received congratulatory letters from King Charles of England, the Prime Minister of Australia, and other public figures.
Orbach was born in Poland in 1920. When he was just a few months old, his mother, Rivka, died of typhus. Until shortly before his passing, he continued to recount memories from his childhood in a traditional Jewish religious school (cheder) in Poland.
In March 1943, shortly before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he managed to escape the ghetto with the help of his brother Mordechai, who was part of the anti-Nazi underground.
Mordechai provided him with a forged identity card and Polish police uniform, but was later murdered. Aside from a sister who had immigrated to the Land of Israel before the Holocaust, all of his family members were murdered.
“If the Germans had found me, they would have shot me on the spot, like my brother," Orbach recalled about his time in hiding in shelters until the end of the war.
After the war, realizing he had no family left in Poland, he contacted an uncle living in Australia. In 1947, he emigrated to Melbourne, where he built a successful knitting business. In 1955, he married Tova, who passed away 15 years ago.