Nahum Rotenberg, who survived the Hanover-Ahlem Nazi concentration camp, has died in Israel at the age of 94. The news was confirmed by his daughter to dpa in Tel Aviv on Thursday.
"We are very sad," she said. Rotenberg, as one of the last concentration camp survivors, had told of his experiences several times during visits to Germany.
Rotenberg was born in 1928 to a Jewish family of bakers in the Polish city of Łódź. After hard years in the city's ghetto, he was deported with his family to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in 1944, when he was 15 years old.
Rotenberg, his brother and a cousin were then taken from Auschwitz to Germany for forced labour. Initially they were sent to the Continental factories in the Hanover district of Stöcken. Rotenberg later recounted frequent acts of mistreatment there.
He witnessed the end of the war in 1945 in Hanover-Ahlem, one of the subcamps of the Neuengamme concentration camp. The inmates there worked in the quarry under the harshest conditions. His brother and cousin both died of exhaustion; Rotenberg himself probably only survived because he worked in the kitchen.
He wrote about his experiences in a book he entitled, "I Have The Pictures Before My Eyes Every Night."
In 1946 he went to what was then Palestine, two years before Israel was founded.
He travelled to Germany again for the first time in 1975 to testify in the trial of Hans Wexler who had been a camp elder - a prisoner appointed by the guards to oversee the other prisoners in certain tasks - in Hanover-Ahlem.
"It was a shock to look this person in the face again. He was alive and so many were dead - because of him," Rotenberg later recounted.
Wexler was sentenced to life imprisonment, but left prison in 1982 for health reasons.
Rotenberg is survived by a son and a daughter as well as several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
