LiberPress Catalonia Award 2014

“It was a tomb; only the hope that we could perhaps get out of there allowed us to go on living”, writes Moshé Haelyon. This sentence expresses the feelings of the Greek poet and prose writer, deported with his whole family from Thessaloniki, Greece, to the Auschwitz concentration camp between 13 and 14 April 1943, during the Second World War.

He was born in Thessaloniki, in February 1925, the son of an old Sephardic family, although his surname comes from Ha-Elion and his ancestors were originally from Ayllón (Segovia). At the age of eighteen, after having lived in a ghetto and having all his property confiscated, he was deported to Auschwitz with his family. They were all exterminated on arrival, except him, and he still doesn’t understand how he escaped death. The young Haelyon remained in the camp, doing all kinds of work, for 21 months, until the evacuation of Auschwitz.

Those were very difficult times. He was included in two of the so-called death marches and was imprisoned in Mauthausen, Malchow and Avenze, where he was finally released in May 1945 by American soldiers.

He emigrated to Israel and joined the Israeli Army, where he reached the rank of colonel. As a mature student, he graduated in letters. He has written and published poetry in Ladino, and has translated Homer’s Odyssey into this language. He has also written a book in honour of his dead sister, The Girl in Auschwitz.

Moshe Haelyon is a member of the governing boards of Yad Vashem, the Center for Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, the Recanati Old Age Home and the Association of Greek Holocaust Survivors.

He has a master’s degree in humanities from the University of Tel Aviv, is a polyglot, and his mother tongue, in addition to Hebrew, is Ladino or old Castilian, which he has tried to preserve so that it is not lost. He is married and has six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.