Language Yiddish, Hebrew Citizenship Israel | Ethnicity Polish Jew Died 7 February 2008, Israel | |
Born June 6, 1913
Lublin, Poland ( 1913-06-06 ) Occupation Novelist, biographer, short story writer Notable works The War of a Jewish Partisan; One Jew's Power, One Jew's Glory Books One Jew's Power, One Jew's Glory: The Life of Rav Yitzchak Shmuel Eliyahu Finkler, the Rebbe of Radoschitz, in the Ghetto and Concentration Camps | ||
Yechiel Granatstein (Hebrew: יחיאל גראנאטשטיין; June 6, 1913 – February 7, 2008) was a Polish-born Jewish author and writer in Yiddish and Hebrew, as well as a partisan fighter in World War II and a Jewish refugee activist following the Holocaust.
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Life
Yechiel Granatstein was born in Lublin, Poland on June 6, 1913. Even before World War II, he had developed his skills as a writer, writing for Dos Yiddish Tagblat and various Agudah periodicals. While still young and single, he was drafted into the Polish army for military training. He lived in Łódź in 1936-1939. Following the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland at the outbreak of World War II he escaped from the Germans to Slonim, which was on the Russian side of the Molotov–Ribbentrop line, eventually entrapped in the Słonim Ghetto after Operation Barbarossa.
In 1942 he escaped to the nearby forests and joined the partisans that were fighting the Nazis. He was accepted into the partisan unit because of his earlier training as a soldier and because he possessed an automatic machine gun. After the war he returned to Łódź where he assisted refugees in leaving Europe from his base at 66 Wschodnia Street and then continued his refugee rescue work in Paris from 1946-1950. It was in Paris in 1950 that he published an autobiography of his time fighting as a Jewish partisan under the title "I Wanted to Live" (Ich hob gevolt lebn" in Yiddish), which detailed the dangers he faced not just from the German Nazis, but from his fellow Russian partisans as well. This book was translated into Hebrew and in English under the title "The War of a Jewish Partisan". He immigrated to Israel in the 1950s where he continued to write about pre-war Europe and the Holocaust. In Israel he wrote for "Shearim", "Hamodia", "HaTzofe" and other newspapers and journals. He also wrote a biography about his father-in-law's, the Radoschitzer Rebbe's, experiences in the ghettos and concentration camps. He died February 7, 2008 in Israel.