Beni Virtzberg

In August 2017 the book was published in English by Yad Vashem, From Death to Battle: Auschwitz Survivor and Palmach Fighter.

In December 2008 the book was reissued in a new edition by Carmel Publishing, including a new introduction, afterword, and photographs.

On August 4, 1968, a little over a week before turning 40 and plagued with depression, Virtzberg took his own life and shot himself in his family home, leaving behind his wife Rachel, a son, Ilan Virtzberg [he], who went on to become an acclaimed songwriter and performer, and a daughter, Dahlia . At his funeral, the chief rabbi of Beer-Sheba, Rabbi Eliyahu Kushelevsky, eulogized him by noting: "Eichmann killed him twenty-five years ago. But we only received the body today."

His book, which was published in 1967, did not meet with commercial success and was eclipsed by the flood of books published following Israel's victory in the Six-Day War. The book chronicled his experiences and those of nine friends who like him survived the Holocaust, immigrated to Israel, and participated in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He wrote:

At the time, Israelis had only partial knowledge about the Holocaust, which fed negative stereotypes and hasty judgments towards Holocaust survivors. The Israeli author Rivka Gurfine, writing in 1965, described a partition separating survivors from the Israeli native population:

He joined the Palmach in February 1948 and fought in 1948 Arab–Israeli War. During the war he participated in efforts to break the blockade of Jerusalem's Jewish residents, and later he joined in the battles down in Negev Desert, during which four of his brothers in arms were killed.

In January 1945, with Allied troops approaching, Auschwitz was vacated and its remaining prisoners were forced into a death march in an attempt to conceal evidence of the atrocities that took place there. Virtzberg's father was too ill to walk, and when he finally collapsed an S.S. soldier shot and killed him as Virtzberg watched in horror.

After he was liberated, Virtzberg spent a few months in the town of Santa Maria in Italy before immigrating to Israel as part of the Youth Aliyah in November 1945. There he was taken in by members of Kibbutz Givat HaShlosha, where he trained for service in the Palmach, the military force organized by Jews in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.

Alarmed by the events of Kristallnacht in 1938, the family relocated to Poland and moved into the Jewish quarter in Sosnowiec. They were subsequently transferred to the Środula ghetto during the war, and on August 1, 1943, the ghetto was liquidated, and they were sent to Auschwitz.

Beni Virtzberg (Hebrew: בני וירצברג; August 12, 1928 – August 4, 1968) was an Israeli forester, Holocaust survivor and writer who was among the first in Israel to write an autobiographical account of his experiences during and after the Holocaust. He began writing his book Migei Haharega Lesha'ar Hagai (From the Valley of Slaughter to the Gate of the Valley) in the wake of the Adolf Eichmann trial, when court testimony by survivors prompted Israelis to openly and publicly discuss what the survivors had lived through.