Among the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora there is no family that does not have any connection to the experience of the Holocaust. I, as a witness, who was in the most horrible hell in human history, feels having the mission to tell and to testify - this is the reason that I also came here, to you.

Lately we celebrated the Passover and already there it was said 'and thou shalt relate to thy son' In our time when the number of people that were there and can testify gets less and on the other hand the number of those denying the Holocaust increases, it is a duty to everyone who can to tell his story.

When I tell it to the youth I pass the memorial torch to them, and furthermore I pass the duty to go on telling to the next generations.

The Holocaust which I experienced personally from age eight till age 12, burned itself deeply into my flash, like the number on my arm, which was burned into me in Birkenau. Until today, it is part of me, of my self, of my life.

I was born in 1932 as Daniel Chanoch in Kovno in Lithuania, the city of Abraham Mapu and Leah Goldberg, to a well established and happy family. I am the youngest in the family. At home we received a Zionistic education. I succeeded to learn in Kindergarten and a little bit in the first grade of Primary School 'Schwebs', where we learned Hebrew, but we did not manage to immigrate to Israel, then Palestine, in time.

Despite the temporary annexation of Lithuania to Russia, due to the Ribbentrop-Molotow agreement and despite the huge Soviet army, which we hoped, would prevent the domination by the Germans, at the beginning we found ourselves in a bloodshed and murder by the Lithuanian population, the neighbours of yesterday.

As a small blond kid, I was sometimes sent to the street to bring food and there I saw the brutality towards the Jews.

We were taken to the Ghetto in Kovno in 1941, then our family was still together, but I, as an 8 year old kid, was not allowed to be seen in order not to be caught - my parents were smart and brave enough to explain to me that I have to protect myself, that the Germans want to catch me and that I should be careful, since children were not allowed in a Concentration Camp, and Kovno was declared as such. Today, as a father and grandfather I imagine how much inner strength was demanded of my parents to make such a terrible statement. Post factum I believe that this utterance contributed in a certain way to my survival.

For instance during the Kinderaktion in the Ghetto. My older brother, at that time he was 12, hid me in one of the attics with more people that were sitting with small kids, kids that cried and the parents that shut their mouth. It lasted several hours. It seems that probably somebody heard something on the outside, or somebody gave the information, because suddenly German soldiers bursted into the attic and shouted 'Raus'. Instinctively I looked for an escape. I concentrated to find an opening for running away. I succeeded to pull a certain ring, which opened a door and saw that a SS officer was standing downstairs. I jumped on his head and started to run in zigzag lines, so that the bullets, which he shot after me would not hit me. In one of the huts, a door opened and somebody, a Jew, let me in and hid me in a large bowl filled with rags and blankets. After a few minutes, the Germans arrived and stabbed their bayonets into the pile of blankets. It was a miracle they did not find me.

This was the first time that I saved myself. That I acted out of a momentary survival instinct. I was the only one who was saved from this hiding place.

In June 1944 the Ghetto was liquidated. My mother, father, brother, sister and me were all deported into the Concentration Camp Stutthof. When we arrived the order was given: Frauen und Kinder raus. (Women and children out). The family decided that I should remain with my father and brother, the men, assuming that my chances for survival are bigger but it became clear that it did not help much. This was the last time I saw my mother Frieda and my older sister Miriam, 17 years old at that time alive. They disappeared in the noise, tumult, shouting and beating. The moment of separation remained vaguely in my memory.

From Stutthof we were sent to the labour camp Landsberg, next to Dachau, where I was with my father and brother. After some time the Germans found out that there are children among the prisoners and in a Kinderaktion all the kids of Kovno who arrived with the men were taken. We were 131 kids, boys who arrived from Ghetto Kovno and who were then taken to Auschwitz Birkenau.

We, 131 small, terrified kids, reached there, the Rampe in Birkenau. Until today it is not exactly clear how it happened - may be we marched together in a exemplary way, lead by one bigger boy, a brother of one of the kids, who joined us, may be we made a good impression on the Germans letting them assume that we can still be used for work, in any case instead of sending us directly to the crematorium, we got the number on the arm, which at that moment was the good news, namely that for now we were kept alive.

From this group, which is called the '131 group', 40 kids survived the war, me being one of them. The rest was killed. Most of the survivors immigrated to Israel after the war. Some of them live in the US. We were liberated on May 5th, 1945 from the camp in Gunskirchen, which is in Austria. Most of the members of the group are in touch every year and on our day of liberation, we meet for a party, which in our eyes is considered as our birthday.

Two years ago a movie was made about this group, which is called 'The birthday of the Kovno Children'. Now it is running also in the US.

I want to tell you a bit about life in Auschwitz, the terrible factory of death (by the way my father Shraga was brought there after me, without me knowing about it and he was killed there in the crematorium).

To be in Auschwitz is to stand in front of the infinitive evil and to feel and understand the meaning of weakness and helplessness towards this infinitive evil. When I raised my eyes to the sky and I saw the aeroplanes of the Allies passing above us and not bombing the extermination and death machinery, I understood that the rescue would not come from the sky. I understood furthermore and in a final way that I am on my own and that I have nobody whom I can trust and rely on, and most of all there I understood that I want to live.

Life in Auschwitz Birkenau was in the shadow of the chimneys which were smoking for 24 hours (when we got there they told us they were baking bread for breakfast there). We lived there a life of torture and degradation, long hours of standing outside in the cold, in the snow, under the terror of the selections of Mengele. I was then 11 years old. My job was to drag wagons with belongings of the people that were sent to the gas chambers. On Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah the biggest selections were organized, then most of our friends were taken, those that did not succeed to survive. To stay alive, or not, was a matter of luck, of a moment, of two centimeters of height etc. In the barrack in which we lived, we were squeezed on a plank bed in a terrible crampedness and with the fear to move. The main thought was to get food. Sometimes I succeeded to scratch something from the pot or to find a piece of bread being left in one of the pockets of the clothing we dragged on the wagon. We were in Auschwitz between July 1944 until 18th January 1945.

On 18th January 1945 we started the death march out of Auschwitz - 20 degrees minus, cold, snow, dressed in rags, no food. Those who stayed behind were shot, on the white snow were blood stains and bodies. At a certain time we were loaded on open trains and were driven to Mauthausen. While walking on the roads nobody helped us, not even a slice of bread. We collected snails from the fence and ate them. In the trains, the situation was worse since did not even have this.

We reached Mauthausen - one of the horrifying death camps - there we even witnessed cannibalism.

From Mauthausen we marched in another death march through Austria to the camp Guskirchen, there the killings continued also by way of poisoning the drinking water. People died like flies. A couple of years ago I visited there and found a pastoral forest as if nothing had happened. I took care that a memorial will be erected for marking the existence of the camp. Later I went there again together with Israeli youth and one of the times, I met there with soldiers of the 71st Infantry Division of the US Army who liberated us on the May 5th, 1945.

I was 12 years old when we were liberated. The meeting with this division in which were also Jewish soldiers with whom I keep in touch until today was the first encounter that we felt that somebody is taking care of us. We felt the warmth and the heart in general and especially the Jewish heart. The second emotional meeting was with the Jews of the Jewish Brigade in the British Army that came to collect us, arranged us and sang us Hebrew songs. The third emotional meeting was with my brother Uri who found out from the lists made by the Brigade that I am alive (after he was sure that I got killed).

We immigrated together to Israel, my brother 16 years old and me being 12. It was clear to us that this is our only option. We were the sole survivors of our family.

We passed the rocking of the illegal immigrant boat Wedgewood in Aliya B. When we reached the coast of Haifa I felt that this is the end of me wandering around. But when we reached the country we still sat in jail, in the clearance camp of Atlit for two month, since the British did not allow the Jews to immigrate at that time. For us children this was a game considering what we had passed before.

In Israel we built our life. My brother being older than me, fought in the Palmach, I learned in an agricultural school, was as a youngster in a Moshav in Be´er Tuvia and later a member of a Kibbutz at the border. I even spent 3 wonderful years not far away from here in Qaucella at the end of the 50´s. Here I learned about early table grapes and came back to Israel to make us of this knowledge.

When I came back to Israel I built a family. I married a Sabarit from Nahalal, 2 children were born carrying the names of my father and my sister. One of the daughters of my brother carries the name of my mother and I have five beautiful granddaughters.

However, the memory does not let go of me, I deal with it all my mature life, and I feel that I owe this to my family who was killed. (My parents, my sister, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins) And I also feel that this suffer taught me something important about life, something that I want to share with others. I learned something important about survival, about the strength that a person has to survive also in impossible circumstances; I learned never to give up hope, always to hold on a little bit more, to believe - as my mother told me still in my childhood - that after the rain the sun will shine again; I learned the strength of friendship, the support and the comradeship that was between us, the children who survived, the power of 'Israelis are responsible for each other', the need of a strong state of Israel with a partnership between Israel and the Diaspora. And mainly I learned about the joy of life, that every day is a present and that the goodness cannot be taken for granted.