Shalom Yoran

In 1991, he found his old manuscript and in 2003 published his wartime memoir. He dedicated the book to his parents. He died on 9 September 2013 in New York.

In 1946, he made his way to the British Mandate of Palestine using false identification to evade the limitations imposed on the Jewish immigration by the British White Paper of 1939. While recovering in a hospital following surgery, he recorded his wartime experiences in Polish and put the notebooks away.

In 1944, Belarus was liberated by the Soviet Union and Jewish partisans were drafted into the Red Army. Later some of them were allowed to join the Soviet-controlled Polish Army.

On September 9, 1942, the Jewish community of Kurzeniec was "liquidated". The Einsatzgruppen, assisted by Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Latvian auxiliary units and some locals, dragged 1,040 Jews, including Selim's parents, from their homes, hideouts and the synagogue, then systematically murdered and burned them. Only a few, including Selim and his older brother Musio, managed to hide in a barn of a sympathetic peasant Ignalia Biruk and later escape to the forest. Later he recalled:

In the woods, they found a disorganized group of about 150 Jewish escapees from nearby ghettos, Nazi concentration camps and Nazi atrocities. Five of them spent the harsh winter of 1942–1943 in a dugout zemlyanka they built themselves in the swamps near Lake Naroch. Without previous experience in construction, they built based on what they could remember from books such as Robinson Crusoe and common sense. They stocked up the food - mostly potatoes - by begging and stealing from local peasants. In the spring they returned to find that fewer than 50 Jews from the original group survived Nazi round ups.

The Nazi Germans invaded Poland in 1939 when he was fourteen. His family fled eastwards into Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union, after the Soviet invasion of Poland, but in 1941 the Germans invaded the USSR and caught up with the Sznycer family in the small village of Kurzeniec.

Shalom Yoran (Hebrew: שָׁלוֹם יוֹרָן; June 29, 1925 – September 9, 2013) was a survivor of the Holocaust and a former Jewish partisan. His World War II memoir, The Defiant. A True Story of Jewish Vengeance and Survival, was first published in 1996.