Yitzhak Katzenelson

Who was Yitzhak Katzenelson?

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Jewish teacher, poet and dramatist. He was born in 1886 in Karelichy near Minsk, and was murdered May 1, 1944 in Auschwitz.

Soon after his birth Katzenelson's family moved to Łódź, Poland, where he grew up. He worked as a teacher, founding a school, and as a dramatist in both Yiddish and Hebrew, starting a theatre group which toured Poland and Lithuania. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939 he and his family fled to Warsaw, where they got trapped in the Ghetto. There he ran an underground school for Jewish children. His wife and two of his sons were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp and murdered there.

Katzenelson participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising starting on April 18, 1943. To save his life, friends supplied him and his surviving son with forged Honduran passports. They managed to leave the ghetto but later surrendered to the Hotel Polski. He was deported to a detention camp in Vittel, France, where the Nazis held American and British citizens and nationals of other Allied and neutral countries, for possible later prisoner exchange.