Batszewa Dagan

Batszewa Dagan was born in 1925 in Łódź

She was born Izabella Rubinsztajn in Łódź, Poland, in 1925, to a textile workshop owner and a seamstress. She grew up in a traditional Zionist home and attended a Polish school. When the war began, her family moved to Radom, and in 1940 they were held in its ghetto.

In the ghetto she joined the underground Hashomer Hatzair group and carried its newspaper from the Warsaw Ghetto. In August 1942 her parents and older sister were murdered in Treblinka. She escaped to Germany, worked as a maid under false papers, was caught, and in May 1943 was sent to Auschwitz.

She was later held in Ravensbrück and Malchow and survived two death marches. British troops liberated her on 2 May 1945. She was the only one of her siblings to survive the war.

She immigrated in September 1945, settled in Holon with her husband and had two sons. She studied at the Shein Teachers Seminary, worked as a kindergarten teacher, and later earned degrees at the Hebrew University and Columbia University. She then managed the kindergarten section of the Tel Aviv-Yafo psychological services and developed methods for teaching the Holocaust to children.

She lectured on the Holocaust in Israel and abroad, and from 1991 she published children's books and poems on the subject. She died in Bat Yam in 2024.