Yitzhak Katzenelson

Yitzhak Katzenelson was a poet whose literature and lectures had an impact on the [Warsaw] ghetto's daily life. He became a leader and teacher who also accompanied the youths in preparing for battle. Katzenelson and his son Tzvi joined the fighting forces after his wife and two sons were deported to Treblinka.

In April 1943, he escaped from the burning ghetto and reached the Vittel camp in France holding a Honduran passport. There he wrote the “Vittel Journal,” an eyewitness testimony of the genocide of the Jewish people. At the end of the April 1944 Yitzhak and his son Tzvi were sent to Auschwitz where they were murdered.

Some of his works were hidden in Vittel and were transferred, after the war, to the archives of the Ghetto Fighters Museum that is named after him, in Kibbutz Lochamei Ha'Geta'ot.