Michael Itzhaki
Born in 1919 in a small town near Warsaw, Poland, he was the youngest of ten children in a large Hasidic family. In his youth, he joined the HaShomer HaDati movement in Poland, served as the head of the Warsaw branch, and was a member of a training group preparing for immigration to the Land of Israel.
In the fall of 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, he fled as a refugee to Vilna, Lithuania, hoping to immigrate to Israel after already spending three years in a kibbutz training program. In the fall of 1940, although he received an immigration certificate, his plans did not materialize. When he remained in Lithuania—by then under Soviet rule—he became a professional actor in the State Jewish Theater in Kovno, while maintaining contact with his HaShomer HaDati comrades and holding fast to his dream of immigrating to Israel.
In the summer of 1941, with the German occupation of Kovno, he was imprisoned in the ghetto. Despite being a foreign refugee, he managed to join the local Brith Zion Organization (A.B.C.) and the general anti-Nazi underground, in which he was active. In the winter of 1942, although he was “protected” from deportations and other actions, he persistently warned his friends to flee the ghetto to the forest. They told him, “You’re climbing the walls.” Determined, he joined a group of woodcutters in the Janova forests and sought contact with partisans. With the encouragement of his admired comrade Ike Greenberg, a leading member of A.B.C., he became involved in arms procurement and sabotage operations on behalf of the general underground in the ghetto.
In the fall of 1943, he was among the first group sent by the ghetto underground to reach the Augustow forests to join the partisans. When the group returned, he set out again with another unit, but unfortunately, after about 13 kilometers, they were intercepted by the Lithuanian police. After a short battle, they were captured and handed over to the Gestapo. The fighters were imprisoned in the notorious “Yellow Prison” in Kovno and, after about four weeks, transferred to the infamous Ninth Fort—a fortress near Kovno used as a mass execution site between 1941 and 1944.
The prisoners were assigned to a labor detail composed of Jews from the Kovno Ghetto and captured Red Army soldiers. Their gruesome task was to exhume and burn the corpses of Jews previously shot into mass graves—often recognizing among them acquaintances from before or during the war. The method of cremation followed that already used in other extermination sites: opening the pits, carrying corpses on stretchers to a prearranged pyre, precise counting of bodies by the supervisor, crushing the bones, and scattering the ashes. The work was carried out under strict SD (Nazi intelligence service) supervision, with prisoners chained together at the legs.
During his imprisonment at the Ninth Fort, he composed and sang a song that became known as the anthem—the lament—of “the corpse burners”:
Blood, blood — in man flow rivers, twenty thousand new dead are here.
Buy a paper, read the news! I bring tidings from all over the world:
Robbery and murder, assault and scandal...
Blood, blood — in man flow rivers, thirty thousand new dead...
Each verse ended with a larger number of dead.
Amid this horrific work, burning tens of thousands of Jewish victims, he longed for death himself, yet found the strength to raise the morale of his comrades when a spark of hope appeared—a plan for organized escape. A small group of prisoners took on the task of planning the breakout. After several failed attempts, one prisoner discovered a tunnel filled with logs leading to the outer wall, and a plan took shape. When he was brought into the secret, he took an active role in the daring escape.
The date was set for Christmas night, December 25, 1943, based on the assumption that the guards would be drunk and inattentive—and indeed they were. Over four weeks, at the risk of their lives and armed with only a small pocketknife found on a corpse and a drill, they sawed through the iron door of the tunnel. On Christmas night, the organizers revealed their plan to all 64 surviving prisoners, who silently crept through the snowy courtyard toward the tunnel entrance, disguised in white sheets. The tunnel led to the outer wall of the fort, and with a six-meter ladder they had prepared, they climbed over it. After the last man exited, the escapees divided into three prearranged groups heading toward different destinations to find refuge: most of the prisoners, including four women, made for the forests to join the partisans; others sought shelter among the local population.
Members of the underground—including him—chose to return to the Kovno Ghetto to inform its residents about the atrocities at the Ninth Fort and to seek organized help from the underground for further escape to the forest. The next day, the Lithuanian security police launched a massive manhunt. Many fugitives seeking shelter among the locals were captured; only a few reached the forests.
He was among the 17 escapees who managed to return to the ghetto. They were hidden by the underground leadership, including some officers of the Jewish police, and with the knowledge of Dr. Elkes, head of the Judenrat. The stench of death clung to their clothes and bodies, and to prevent tracking by German dogs, they were secretly taken to the ghetto bathhouse, where their corpse-reeking clothes were burned and they were allowed to wash.
Out of historical awareness and in order to counter the Germans’ efforts to erase evidence of the mass murders, he was among 11 escapees who composed a detailed memorandum (Zikaron Devarim), dictated in Russian by a Jewish POW named Vasilenko to a female underground courier who had come to their hiding place. After all had signed it, one copy was delivered to the Judenrat offices, where a secret duplicate was made. One copy was hidden in the underground archives in the ghetto (later recovered and deposited in the Lithuanian State Archive), and the other was sent to the partisans’ headquarters in the Rudniki forests and from there to Moscow. Days later, the document was read on Moscow Radio and presented as an example of Soviet heroism.
Because their presence endangered the ghetto, on January 6, 1944, disguised as a labor group, he left the ghetto in a truck with 28 fighters—most of them escapees from the Ninth Fort—led by Chaim Yellin, the commander of the Kovno Ghetto underground. Their destination was the Rudniki Forest near Vilna, where he joined the partisan battalion Death to the Occupiers (Smert Okupantam), in which he fought bravely as a fighter and commander until the arrival of the Red Army.
After liberation, in late 1944, he was among the organizers of the Bricha—the illegal rescue movement helping survivors flee Eastern Europe toward the West and then to the Land of Israel. Along the routes of the Bricha, he met Deborah, who would become his wife—a 16-year-old survivor of the Kovno Ghetto. Together they smuggled dozens of Jewish youths from the “Union” movement in Poland through Slovakia and Hungary into Romania, disguised as Greek refugees returning home.
In Austria, he was appointed by the Bricha as the coordinator for crossings between the Russian and American zones at St. Valentin, overseeing the secret passage of thousands of Holocaust survivors. In November 1945, he and Deborah married in a displaced persons camp in Austria, later moving to the Greifenberg DP camp in Germany, where they founded a Zionist youth training kibbutz. Deborah taught Hebrew, while he guided the young people and founded a theater group that performed in various camps.
Together with their group, Aba Berdichev, they boarded a coal ship renamed Latrun—a clandestine immigrant vessel carrying 1,275 passengers—which was intercepted by the British and deported to Cyprus. In 1947, they finally reached the Land of Israel with their comrades, settling first in the Lahat group in Even Yehuda, intending to establish a kibbutz, and later joining Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak.
He worked as an educator and drama teacher in his kibbutz and at the Neve Hadassah Youth Village. He was one of the veteran employees of the prefabricated building company M.L.T. and later served as a Jewish Agency emissary to Brazil and Uruguay.
He devoted his dramatic talent and all his energy to instilling Holocaust awareness among youth in Israel and abroad. He was among the founders of Moreshet – The Institute for Holocaust Studies and traveled to IDF bases and educational institutions across the country to tell his personal story, giving faces and names to those who did not live to see liberation. He touched the hearts of tens of thousands of young people who carried his story with them for many years.
He passed away on May 24, 1990.
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