Arie Eitani will be one of six survivors lighting torches at the State Ceremony opening Holocaust Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem.
Arie Eitani was born in Milan, Italy in 1927, the only child of Hungarian immigrants Samuel and Etel. On the eve of World War II, Jews with foreign citizenship were forced to leave Italy. The family returned to Hungary and settled in the city of Eger. In 1942 Samuel was conscripted to the Hungarian Jewish Labor Service. In May 1944 Arie was incarcerated in the Eger ghetto with his mother, his grandfather and the rest of his family. Approximately one month later they were deported to Auschwitz, and the entire family except for Arie was murdered in the gas chambers. Arie was imprisoned in Auschwitz, and then transferred to the Kaufering camp, where he was a forced laborer. He had to drag sacks of cement and corpses, and he witnessed suicides, murders, and the throwing of prisoners’ bodies into an enormous pit.
When Kaufering was evacuated, the inmates were sent on a death march. Arie reached the Allach camp, where he contracted typhus. When US army soldiers liberated the camp, Arie was too weak to stand up. “I crawled around and made do with remnants of food strewn on the ground.”
Arie returned to Eger and boarded the ma’apilim (illegal immigrants) vessel Knesset Israel in November 1946. However, the British intercepted the boat and imprisoned its passengers in Cyprus. Arie finally reached Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) in 1947. He enlisted in the Haganah and fought in the War of Independence, including in Mishmar Hayarden, which was attacked by the Syrians in June 1948.
Arie is one of the founders of Kibbutz Ha'on in northern Israel. There, he met and married Rina, a Holocaust survivor from Poland. Rina z”l and Arie have 2 children, 8 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren.
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