The oldest Holocaust survivor dies at 107

Yehuda Aharon Widawski,The oldest Holocaust survivor, has died at 107.
Born in 1919 in Turek, Poland, he later lived in Łódź. After Nazi Germany invaded Poland, he and his family were forced into the Łódź Ghetto. In August 1944 they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His parents and several siblings were murdered. He and his brother Yehoshua survived selection and were later sent to forced labor at Friedland, assembling aircraft parts. Soviet forces liberated the camp in May 1945.
After the war he returned to Łódź, married, and started a family. In 1950 they immigrated to Israel and settled in Tel Aviv.
In 1978 he went back to Poland to find his grandmother’s grave and found Jewish cemeteries neglected and destroyed. That search became his life’s work: he helped identify and restore more than 3,000 graves, especially in Łódź, and traveled Poland to preserve burial sites.
In 2012 he lit a torch at Israel’s official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem. Asked what he considered his answer to the Nazis, he said they had lost, and that his people were free and would not be destroyed again.
President Isaac Herzog praised his decades of work locating and restoring graves and called his life a testament to survival, memory, and rebuilding.