Holocaust Survivor Zvi Glazer: From Auschwitz and Dachau to Rebuilding Life in Israel

“I knew I was going to die. The question wasn’t if, but when,” recalls Zvi, a Holocaust survivor who lit a memorial torch in memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Zvi Glazer was born in 1928 in Poland. At the age of 12, the Zdunska Wola ghetto was established, and all Jews of the town were ordered to move there. When the ghetto was liquidated, Zvi and his mother were transported in cattle cars to the Lodz ghetto. His father and brother were sent to the gas vans in Chelmno.

In August 1944, explosions were heard — the artillery of the Red Army. The Jews of the ghetto hoped for liberation, but before the Soviet army arrived, the Germans hurried to liquidate the Lodz ghetto. The remaining Jews, including Zvi and his mother, were deported to Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, Zvi was separated from his mother and sent to a labor camp, later transferred to Dachau, and from there to another camp in Germany.

During forced labor in a heavy snowstorm, Zvi collapsed. An older German guard approached him and saved his life. “He removed my wet clothes, dried them, and gave me a slice of bread with jam. I saw Elijah the Prophet in the figure of a German guard,” Zvi shared tearfully.

Zvi later fell ill with typhus. When he recovered, he was transported by train to an unknown destination. During the journey, air raid sirens warned of Allied planes, and the guards ordered the prisoners off the wagons to lie on the ground. In one of these moments, Zvi decided to escape. Nazi guards chased him, but he managed to slip away. “Everything depended on those two minutes of escape,” Zvi recalls.

Emaciated and exhausted, he reached the home of a German farmer. Pretending to be Polish, he worked on the family’s farm in exchange for food and a place to sleep until liberation. In 1945, shortly before boarding a ship that sailed from Italy to the Land of Israel, he learned that his mother had also survived. Together they immigrated to Israel. Zvi married Yehudit, and they built a family with three daughters, ten grandchildren, and three great-granddaughters.