Yitzhak Arad (1926–2021)

Yitzhak Arad was born Icchak Rudnicki in Święciany, Poland (present-day Švenčionys, Lithuania). Growing up, he joined the Zionist youth movement Ha-No'ar ha-Tsiyyoni.
After Nazi Germany invaded his country in World War II, his parents were murdered. Aged 15, he was put to work by the Germans cleaning confiscated Soviet weapons. He, his sister, and a group of friends eventually stole a gun and escaped. They formed an underground group in the ghetto and later escaped from the ghetto into the forest. In 1943, he joined the Soviet partisans of the Markov Brigade, but suffered from their anti-Semitism. Apart from a foray into the Vilna Ghetto in April 1943 to meet with underground leader Abba Kovner, he stayed with the Soviet partisans until the end of the war. He fought the Germans and their helpers and participated in acts of sabotage such as the mining of trains.

After the war ended, Arad entered Palestine by boat in violation of the British blockade. He adopted his Hebrew name and joined Israel's fight for independence. He rose to the rank of brigadier general in the IDF. Following his retirement from active service in 1972, Arad earned a doctorate at Tel Aviv University and began an academic career there as a lecturer on Jewish history. His specialty was the history of the Holocaust in areas of the Soviet Union. He served as the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance authority, from 1972 to 1993. He testified at war crimes trials in Israel and was a consultant for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Among his many published works were
Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews of Vilna (1982);
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (1987); and the two-volume History of the Holocaust: Soviet Union and Annexed Territories (2004). He also wrote a memoir, The Partisan: From the Valley of Death to Mt. Zion, published in 1979.