Nir, Yeshayahu, 1930-

Yeshayahu Nir (Konštantín Nürnberg in Hebrew Yeshayahu) was born in 1930 into a Žilina Jewish family as the only child of his parents. The Nürnberg family managed to avoid the first wave of deportations in 1942, but the question of transports arose again in 1944. For several days they managed to run away thanks to warning of someone from the Christian community, but at last they were detained by Germans due to betrayal of farmers who were selling food to this fleeing family. In the fall 1944 they ended up in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.They spent in Auschwitz few days and afterwards they were moved to the camp in Niederorschel, where they stayed in relative safety half a year. In 1945 when the front was approaching, they were evacuated to the camp Buchenwald. After the war he studied at the Secondary School of Agriculture in Nitra and with the gained skills he left to former Palestine, to begin with founding the young State of Israel. There he founded the first kibbutz and it members were mostly of Slovak origin. Later he made a short film about the extent of knowledge the Vatican representatives and Slovak politicians had about the holocaust. After the Velvet Revolution, he returned to Slovakia for short time, but until today he has still lived in Israel.