One of the most important writers in the state of Israel, Aharon Appelfeld (born 1932), wrote feelingly of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. He was a recipient of the Israel Prize for literature.

Aharon Appelfeld was born in 1932 into an assimilated Jewish family in Czernowitz, Rumania. His mother was killed during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and he was deported to a concentration camp. He managed to escape and joined the bands of children wandering in the forests of Poland. After three years he was picked up by the Soviet army in 1944 and worked in the kitchens in the Ukraine until the end of the war.

After 1945 Appelfeld traveled to Italy and finally went to settle in what is now Israel in 1946. Until then his main education had been in the concentration camp at Transniestra, and he did not go back to school, even in Israel. However, he studied Hebrew...