“To escape the nightmares and try to forget, I worked day and night. I never stopped. I was so tired when I slept that I never dreamed,” said the Polish-born 100-year-old.
Hadani’s father died in the Lodz ghetto before he and his family were sent to the death camp in 1944.
His mother was killed as soon as they arrived and his sister murdered when the Nazis liquidated the women’s camp as the Red Army neared.
Hadani was almost picked out for medical experiments by Josef Mengele, the SS doctor known as the “Angel of Death”. But he threw Mengele off by speaking to him in German.
“Stay there, you dog,” Mengele replied.
It was only later that the 20-year-old realised he could have been shot on the spot. “I will never forget that moment,” he said.
Put to work in one of the camp’s factories, Hadani survived the “Death Marches” and was liberated from the Wobbelin camp in Germany by American GIs.
When he returned home to Poland, he realised that the rest of his family had perished. He left for Italy before emigrating to Israel just after the creation of the state in June 1948.
He began to rebuild his life and became an officer in the navy before founding a press photo agency, leaving two million pictures telling the story of the young country to its national library.
Small and bearded, Hadani still has remarkable energy, proudly showing the driving licence that was renewed before his 100th birthday before driving the AFP team to his home in Guivatayim in central Israel.
Every Thursday morning he joins what he calls a “parliament” of former journalists and diplomats to put the world to rights over a coffee.
Hadani, who was born Dunek Zloczewski, is convinced that the testimony of the thousands of survivors like him will help to ensure the Shoah is not written out of history.
But what worries him is the future of Israel, particularly since the October 7 attacks. A fierce critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he warned that the Holocaust “could happen again. Men are animals. That is how I see the world”.
Abraham Wassertheil, born in 1928 in Germany: four children, three grandchildren, two great-grandchildren
Long silences follow when Abraham Wassertheil is asked what happened to his family during the war.
