Lighting the torch: The survivors at the heart of Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony

Every year, the Yad Vashem state ceremony places Holocaust survivors at the center of Israel’s national remembrance.

This year, eight survivors will take part in key roles in the state ceremony on Monday evening at 8 p.m. Six will light torches, one will speak on behalf of the survivors, and one will recite the prayer for the souls of the departed El Maleh Rahamim. Their stories span Lithuania, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Poland, Libya, Hungary, and Romania, reminding us of the terrible and wide geographic reach of the Holocaust and the different paths by which survivors later arrived in Israel.

Born in 1928 in Alytus, Lithuania, Saadia Bahat grew up in a family rooted in civic and Jewish communal life. His father was a lawyer and municipal figure; his mother was a teacher. That world ended with the Nazi invasion. The family moved to Vilna, where they were forced into the ghetto. His father was murdered in one of the Aktionen, and his mother was later also killed.

As a teenager, Bahat volunteered for deportation to labor camps in Estonia, believing that if enough Jews came forward, the Germans might stop attacking the ghetto. Instead, he was drawn into a brutal chain of camps where he chopped trees, laid railway tracks, worked in swamps, and endured freezing temperatures and starvation. At one stage, when his shoes disintegrated, he walked barefoot in the snow.

He survived repeated selections, was later transferred to Stutthof, and eventually to a submarine yard, where he worked as a welder in claustrophobic conditions. As the war neared its end, he was forced westward on a death march while ill with typhus.

Left behind in a hut with two others, he believed death was imminent. “We lay there dying and waited. Four days later, the door opened to reveal a Soviet soldier. We were liberated!” he recalls.

Bahat reached Mandatory Palestine in 1946, joined the Haganah and Palmach, fought in the Harel Brigade, and was wounded in the War of Independence. He later studied at the Technion and spent 37 years at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, receiving major honors, including the Israel Defense Prize. “I couldn’t look my grandchildren in the eye if I wasn’t contributing my all,” he says of his work.

After retirement, Bahat began a second career as a sculptor.

Michael Sidko was born in 1936 in Kyiv, the second of four children. His father was a non-Jewish Ukrainian, and his mother came from a Jewish family headed by a rabbi. His childhood, before the war, was marked by small domestic rhythms – family gatherings, Shabbat candles, and the pigeons raised by his older brother Grisha.

When the Germans invaded in 1941, the family almost escaped. They boarded an evacuation train, but Grisha suddenly remembered he had forgotten to open the pigeon enclosure at home. He ran back so the birds would not die. Their mother and siblings followed him off the train. The train left without them.

Soon afterward, Sidko and his family were caught in the events that led to the Babi Yar massacre. A building custodian informed on them, and they were arrested and taken to the ravine. Sidko and Grisha were separated from their mother, younger sister, and baby brother – and watched them being murdered.

From there, Sidko survived largely because Grisha kept him alive. The brothers moved between hiding places, searched for food, and tried to stay invisible. They were nearly betrayed by relatives; hid in the cellar of their old building; and were arrested again before managing to convince the Gestapo they were not Jewish.

Their survival also depended on two women in the building where they were hiding, Sofia Krivorot-Baklanova and her daughter Galina, who repeatedly told German soldiers and police that the boys were their own family. Both women were later recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

Sidko later reunited with his father, served in the Red Army, worked as an engineer, and immigrated to Israel in 2000. His story remains one of the starkest in this year’s group – a child survivor of one of the Holocaust’s most infamous killing sites.

Miriam Bar Lev, born Daisy Van Cleef in 1936, entered the world in Tel Aviv but spent her childhood in the Netherlands after her family relocated to Amsterdam. Her mother had come to Mandatory Palestine from Germany as a Zionist pioneer, and her father was Dutch. By the time Bar Lev was old enough to remember her surroundings clearly, Europe’s Jews were already being cornered.

After the Nazi occupation, six-year-old Daisy was ordered to wear the yellow star. She later recalled wearing it “with pride,” because it made her feel older, before she understood what it truly meant. As deportations escalated, her family survived repeated raids by hiding in the shower, with neighbors, and behind a sign on the door warning of an “infectious disease.”

Eventually, they were caught and sent to Westerbork, and from there to Bergen-Belsen. Bar Lev and her mother were separated from her father, who was forced into labor and later died after becoming ill. They endured hunger, cold, overcrowding, and endless roll calls in which people collapsed in front of them.

After two years in Bergen-Belsen, they were put aboard what later became known as the “Lost Train,” one of the war’s final, chaotic deportation transports. “I thought it was the end of us,” Bar Lev said. During one stop, she and her mother found potatoes intended for animals, but German guards stopped them from eating them. Typhus spread through the cattle cars. Many died before the surviving prisoners were liberated by the Red Army near Tröbitz in April 1945.

Bar Lev and her mother later returned to Mandatory Palestine, where she settled in Kibbutz Ginegar, took the name Miriam, served in the IDF, studied nursing, and worked for years in healthcare and schools.

Moshe Harari was born Monek Greenberg in 1934 in the Polish village of Paprotnia, where his family was the only Jewish family in the area. They lived among orchards, fields, and farm buildings, and his father traded produce and other goods with local farmers. It was an isolated Jewish life, but not a protected one.

After being forced into the Mordy ghetto, the family initially stayed alive through Harari’s father slipping out to work with farmers and bringing back food. In August 1942, as German soldiers and Polish policemen rounded up Jews for murder, the Greenbergs escaped into the forest. After months of wandering, they reached a Polish farmer named Lipinski, who agreed to hide them in exchange for payment.

The family first hid behind straw bales in a barn attic and was later concealed in a pit under a granary floor, where they could only crouch or lie down. The farmer’s daughter, Wanda, brought them food while pretending to feed the chickens. They whispered to avoid discovery. They were covered in lice. Harari had only two books to read, and he read them again and again.

Liberation in 1944 was followed by a different kind of terror. Returning home, Harari’s family encountered lethal antisemitism. His father disappeared and is presumed to have been murdered. Armed Poles attacked the family home, badly wounding his mother and shooting Harari. Later, when a mob broke into a house where Jews were staying and killed 10 people, Harari survived only because he hid with his mother and sister beneath the floorboards.

The surviving family eventually reached a DP camp in Kassel, boarded the Kaf Tet B’November to Mandatory Palestine, and, after detention in Cyprus, made it to Israel. Harari later worked for decades in Israel’s military industry.

Ilana Fallach was born in 1937 in Benghazi, Libya, into a traditional Jewish family. Her father was a tailor, her mother sewed jalabiyas, and the family lived alongside Muslim neighbors in a setting very different from the European landscapes more commonly associated with the Holocaust. Her inclusion in this year’s ceremony is an important reminder that the catastrophe reached North Africa as well.

In 1940, British bombing struck Benghazi and killed members of her family. Her father, a British citizen, fled to Egypt as the Italian authorities began targeting those linked to Britain. In 1942, Fallach and her relatives were deported in a truck under brutal conditions.

“It was boiling hot during the day, and freezing cold at night. They didn’t let us get off to eat or go to the toilet. We did everything inside the truck,” she recalls. Her sister Yolanda died on the journey and was buried by the roadside.

The family was taken to the Giado concentration camp in Libya, where deportees were packed into barracks divided only by hanging blankets. Hunger, lice, disease, and death became daily realities. Bedouin came to the fence and traded food for jewelry. Fallach would climb the fence to barter until a soldier kicked her and broke her leg. Later, typhus killed another sister, Allegra.

After liberation by the British in early 1943, the family returned to Benghazi only to find their home occupied. Fallach nearly lost her leg to infection and only survived because she was given penicillin. Soon afterward, anti-Jewish riots broke out, Jewish homes and businesses were attacked, and the family fled to Tripoli. “During our time in Tripoli, we celebrated the State of Israel’s first Independence Day,” she recalls. They immigrated to Israel in 1949.

In Israel, Fallach worked from a young age to help support her family and later opened a hair salon. She has since dedicated herself to speaking to educational groups about the Holocaust of Libyan Jewry.

Avigdor Neumann was born in 1931 into a Satmar hassidic family in Sevluš, then part of Czechoslovakia, and today in Ukraine. He was one of seven children in a religious household led by a father known for both trade and communal generosity.

That life was shattered in 1944 when the Germans occupied Hungary, and the family was expelled from its home during Passover. His father was tortured. The family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in a packed cattle car. On arrival, Neumann was separated from his mother and siblings and pushed into the men’s line. He survived selection only by telling Mengele he was older and trained as a mechanic.

The next day, he learned that his mother, sisters, and brothers had already been murdered. His father and one surviving brother later died elsewhere in the camp system. “From the moment they tattooed me with a number, I no longer had a name,” he later said.

Neumann scavenged for food while assigned to garbage collection. At one point, he discovered his eldest sister was still alive and shouted to her over a fence: “I’m 13 years old today! It’s my bar mitzvah!” Other prisoners risked their lives to obtain tefillin for him.

He survived multiple selections, a death march, Mauthausen, and Gunskirchen, where he was liberated by the US Army. He later made his way to Mandatory Palestine after British detention in Cyprus, and went on to fight in Israel’s wars until the Yom Kippur War, when he was wounded.

Today, Neumann still speaks about the Holocaust and participates in a project connecting Holocaust survivors with survivors of the October 7 massacre.

This year’s ceremony will also feature remarks on behalf of the survivors by Haviva Burst, born Luba-Chaya Hochlerer in 1930 in Wojsławice, Poland. She was the eldest of four children in a traditional Jewish household. Her father was a trader and shopkeeper; her mother raised the family.

After the German invasion, Burst’s mother and three younger brothers went into hiding and disappeared without a trace. She remained with her father, who believed that her Polish appearance and language fluency might improve her chances of survival. The two first hid in a pit in the forest. Later, as snow made concealment more difficult, her father paid Christians to hide her and move her whenever danger grew too great. The last time she saw her father, she ran after him and begged him not to leave her behind. He hugged her and walked away.

Only later did she understand that this was the act that saved her life. He was murdered in the forest.

In one hiding place, she lived behind a wardrobe, stretching her limbs only at night. When the money for her concealment ran out, Burst fled and wandered alone through the Polish forests, sleeping in stables among rats and mice, scavenging for food, and moving on whenever she feared she had aroused suspicion. One day, a man stopped her, interrogated her, and forced her to admit she was Jewish. She expected to be handed over or killed. Instead, he took her home and treated her as family.

After the war, she was gathered with other child survivors, reached Selvino in Italy, boarded the Haim Arlozorov to Mandatory Palestine, and after detention in Cyprus, immigrated to Israel. She later served in the Nahal Brigade and became one of the founders of Kibbutz Tze’elim.

Reciting El Maleh Rahamim this year will be Menachem Neeman, born in 1938 in Romania and raised in Câmpulung Moldovenesc. He was the youngest of five children in a religious home. His father was a shochet and teacher. One of his older brothers, sent to relatives in Hungary, was later murdered in Auschwitz.

In late 1940, Menachem and his family were deported by cattle train to Atachi, then ferried across the Dniester into the Shargorod ghetto. There, hunger and disease dominated daily life. “After the hunger we suffered in the Holocaust, to this day there is nothing I won’t eat,” he says.

Typhus spread rapidly. The family spent much of its time removing lice from one another. His father was sent out daily for forced labor and once whipped for trying to bring back vegetables for the family.

Even so, Jewish life continued in fragments. On holidays, Jews still gathered to pray. On Passover, they tried to avoid bread. On Shavuot, his mother somehow managed to make noodles from a little flour and water. “Mother, promise us that you will make us noodles every Shavuot,” the children asked.

After liberation by the Red Army, the family eventually immigrated to Israel in 1949. Neeman went on to become vice-president of the Haifa District Court, a lecturer in family law, and chairman of the supervisory nominating committee of the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets.

He also remained deeply connected to Jewish liturgical music, first in the choir of the Military Rabbinate, and later through recordings of cantorial music.

Together, these eight biographies represent a broad cross-section of the Holocaust experience: ghettos, camps, mass shootings, hiding, forced labor, deportation, and postwar displacement.

They also reveal the beauty in the lives built afterward in Israel – in the military, the courts, healthcare, education, industry, and public testimony.

Such is the group standing at the center of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony.