Eliezer Gruenbaum

Eliezer Gruenbaum was born in 1908 in Warsaw

Eliezer Gruenbaum was born in Warsaw in 1908 to Miriam Luria and Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a Polish Jewish politician. He attended a Hebrew school and the Hinuch gymnasium and joined Hashomer Hatzair. Unlike his father, he became a communist and opposed Zionism.

He began law studies at the University of Warsaw and was jailed for illegal communist activity, receiving a sentence of four and a half years. After leaving prison early, he went to Paris, finished his law studies and edited a party newspaper. He fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War under the name Leon Berger.

In World War II he volunteered for the French army and later returned to underground communist activity. He was arrested and in 1942 sent to Auschwitz, where he became a barracks kapo in Birkenau. Prisoners accused him of violence, but a prisoner committee at Buchenwald acquitted him, and a later case in France ended without conviction.

He immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1946, lived with his parents in Jerusalem and wrote memoirs. The Haganah first refused to draft him because of his past, but he was later enlisted. He was killed at Ramat Rachel on 22 May 1948, and part of his memoirs was published in 1952.