Courtesy of Wikipedia
Aharon Appelfeld (February 16, 1932 – January 4, 2018) was an Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor. Aharon Appelfeld was born in Jadova Commune, Storojineț County, in the Bukovina region of the Kingdom of Romania, now Ukraine. In an interview with the literary scholar Nili Gold in 2011, he remembered his hometown in this district, Czernowitz, as “a very beautiful” place, full of schools and with two Latin gymnasiums, where 50 to 60 percent of the population was Jewish. In 1941, when he was nine years old, the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation, and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a forced labor camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel’s independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list in 1960. (Both Appelfeld and his father had presumed the other had been murdered in the Holocaust. They had both made their way separately to Israel after the war.) The father had been sent to a ma’abara (refugee camp) in Be’er Tuvia. The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld had never been able to write about it.
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