Contested memory: a story of a 'kapo' in Auschwitz - history, memory and politics

This essay confronts the controversial life and death of Eliezer Gruenbaum, a Jewish-communist turned Auschwitz kapo, whose father, Yitzak Gruenbaum, was a leading Zionist and Israeli minister. The 1948 killing of Eliezer during Israel's War of Independence, probably by Israeli forces was based on the assumption of early survivor memory whereby the grey zones simply did not exist. The effort of the father to rehabilitate the son, even posthumously, revealed the fissures in Jewish society that reached back to the prewar period.