Abba Naor
Holocaust survivor and witness
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Tel-Aviv (Israel)
Abba Naor was born Abba Nauchowicz in 1928 in Kaunas, Lithuania. After the German army occupied Lithuania in 1941, the Nauchowicz family was forced into the Kaunas ghetto, and his older brother and his grandfather were murdered. In 1944, the family were deported to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland and then separated. His mother and younger brother were subsequently murdered in Auschwitz. He himself survived deportation to a Dachau subcamp, forced labour and two death marches.
After the war, Naor worked for Israeli intelligence and was involved in the secret mission to rescue Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s. He now divides his time between Munich and Tel Aviv. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2009 and the Bavarian Order of Merit in 2018. His autobiography, Ich sang für die SS. Mein Weg vom Ghetto zum israelischen Geheimdienst (I sang for the SS: my path from the ghetto to Mossad) (co-written by Helmut Zeller, Munich: C.H.Beck), came out in 2014. Naor regularly tells his story to groups of schoolchildren, college students and adults. Since 2017, he has been vice president of the International Dachau Committee. In 2019, he took part in the LediZ project at LMU Munich, which created an interactive 3-D testimony of Abba Naor.
After the war, Naor worked for Israeli intelligence and was involved in the secret mission to rescue Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s. He now divides his time between Munich and Tel Aviv. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2009 and the Bavarian Order of Merit in 2018. His autobiography, Ich sang für die SS. Mein Weg vom Ghetto zum israelischen Geheimdienst (I sang for the SS: my path from the ghetto to Mossad) (co-written by Helmut Zeller, Munich: C.H.Beck), came out in 2014. Naor regularly tells his story to groups of schoolchildren, college students and adults. Since 2017, he has been vice president of the International Dachau Committee. In 2019, he took part in the LediZ project at LMU Munich, which created an interactive 3-D testimony of Abba Naor.