Halina Birenbaum

Halina Birenbaum was born in 1929 in Warsaw

Halina Birenbaum was born Halina Grynsztajn in Warsaw on 15 September 1929. She was the youngest child and only daughter of Jakub and Pola Grynsztajn. After Germany occupied Poland, the family's home was inside the Warsaw Ghetto.

In 1943 she was sent to Majdanek and then to Auschwitz. In January 1945 she survived the death march from Auschwitz and was moved to Ravensbrück and then to Neustadt-Glewe, where the Red Army freed her in May 1945. Her mother was murdered in Majdanek, and her father and brothers in Treblinka.

After the war she studied at an evening high school. In 1947 she moved to Israel with a Hashomer Hatzair group and settled on a kibbutz. She married Chaim Birenbaum, also a survivor, and they had two sons.

In 1986 she returned to Poland for the first time and then began to record her memories. Her prose and poetry, written in Polish and Hebrew, deal with the Holocaust and have been translated into several languages. She speaks to young people in Israel, Poland and Germany and works for better ties between these countries.

She lives in Herzliya. Her son Yaakov Gilad wrote the title song of Yehuda Poliker's album Ashes and Dust about her, and she wrote the song Flowers in the Wind on the same album.