Noach (Natan) Żelechower

Noach (Natan) Żelechower was born on the 8th of October 1904 in Warsaw, Poland, to Pessa (nee Prechner), a housewife, and Fajwel Żelechower, an industrialist, a manufacturer of haberdashery. He was a middle child with 11 siblings, most of them perished in the Warsaw Ghetto and ensuing genocide of the Jews. Noach’s profession was a dental technician. In the 1920s he married his first wife, Balbina Nurflus, and in July 1927 their daughter Stella was born. With the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi Germany occupation of Poland, Noach and his small family’s comfortable life in Warsaw was thrown into turmoil, especially after they were forced to move into the Warsaw Ghetto in the autumn of 1940. After losing his loved ones to Treblinka extermination camp in the Grossaktion during the summer of 1942, Noach went on to experience the hardships and torment of one transit camp, 7 concentration camps, and the excruciating forced labor and brutal torture in various work units, including in the depths of underground coal mines and in the valley of a stone quarry. After being liberated by the Americans from Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945, Noach returned to the Warsaw Ghetto where he confirmed his beloved wife and daughter did not survive the Holocaust. In 1946 he felt duty bound to record, in a detailed hair-raising description, of the horrors that he had experienced during the war, interweaving into his narrative a great sense of humor and irony typical of him. Later that year, he met and married Paulina (Pola) Weinreb, also a Holocaust survivor. Their only daughter, Hana, was born in May 1947. The new family made Aliya to Israel in March 1949 to start their new lives. Noach passed away in 1994 at the age of 89 without seeing his memoir published. * * * Hana Cytron, 74 years old, is the daughter and only child of Noach (Natan) and Paulina Żelechower, both Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors. Hana was born in Bad Reichenhall in Germany. In 1949 when Hana was 2, she and her parents made Aliya to Israel and lived in Tiberias. She studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then worked and managed travel agencies and airlines for 40 years up to her retirement in 2007. After retiring, Hana studied and achieved her make-up artist diploma and worked for a period of time at a TV channel. As well as spending time with family, her hobbies include photography and reading. She married Stefan Cytron in 1969 and they live in Tel Aviv. They have 2 children and 5 grandchildren. Hana believes that it is important to publish her father's personal Holocaust memoir so it is accessible worldwide to future generations who are not familiar with the Polish language or with the Holocaust history, so they can read about the atrocities caused to the Jews during World War II from a personal and authentic point of view and remember it forever. * * * Stefan Cytron is 79 years old. His parents, Arthur and Henna Cytron, with his 2 elder sisters, were deported from Poland to Russia during World War II and there he was born. At the age of 3, his family returned to Poland. In 1957 when Stefan was 15, they immigrated to Israel. During his military service in the Israeli Armored Corps, he served in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, where he was the only one unharmed when his tank was hit by a Syrian missile. Stefan studied at Ort Shenkar Textile School. He worked in the textile industry and later in sales. Stefan loves sport, bicycling, photography, and music. After retiring in 2008, in around the year 2015 without any prior knowledge, he reinvented himself and started writing and composing songs. His tunes are influenced by various musical styles and rhythms. To date he has recorded 33 songs in collaboration with various singers. Since Stefan began making music, his wife Hana has been acting as his personal PR manager. That is how they enjoy their retirement, spending quality time making music together.