Dr. Arad was born Yitzhak Rudnicki in Święciany, Poland (now Svencionys, Lithuania) in November 1926. In his youth, he belonged to a Zionist youth movement and was educated in Hebrew schools. At the outbreak of WWII, he lived with his family in Warsaw. After three months of German occupation of the city, he fled with his sister back to Święciany. His parents were murdered during the Shoah. During the war, he managed to escape a murderous German aktion and sneak back into the town ghetto, where he was put to work in a munitions warehouse. He began to smuggle weaponry and help form a ghetto underground movement. In February 1943, at the age of sixteen, he escaped to the nearby forest, where he joined the Soviet partisans. Apart from a foray infiltrating the Vilna ghetto in April of that year to meet with underground leader Abba Kovner, Yitzhak stayed with the partisans until the end of the war, fighting the Germans and their collaborators in the Narocz Forest of Belarus and in eastern Lithuania, for which he received the highest partisan award.
In December 1945, Dr. Arad immigrated to Eretz Israel on the illegal immigrant ship Hannah Szenes. He served in the Israel Defense Forces, most of the time in the armored brigade. His last appointment was IDF Chief Education Officer; he retired in 1972 as Brigadier General. In his academic career, Arad lectured on Jewish History at Tel Aviv University and was a guest professor at Yeshiva University, New York.
Dr. Arad served as the Chairman of the Directorate of Yad Vashem for 21 years (1972-1993), and he remained associated with Yad Vashem until his last days, serving as Deputy Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council. He researched WWII and the Holocaust, and was published extensively as an author and editor, primarily in Hebrew, English and Russian. In 2004, he was awarded Yad Vashem’s annual Buchman Memorial Prize for his book, The History of the Holocaust: Soviet Union and the Annexed Territories. In 2009, Nebraska University Press and Yad Vashem published Arad's The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, a book that earned the Jewish Book Council's National Jewish Book Award. In recent years, Arad published several important works reflecting updated research and documentation about the Holocaust. In 2010 he published In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in the War Against Nazi Germany and a revised and expanded work entitled The Operation Reinhard Camps: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka published by Yad Vashem and Indianan University Press in 2018. Most of the books published in English were also published in Hebrew.
Dr. Yitzhak Arad passed away on May 6, 2021.
![Dr. Yitzhak Arad photographed for the joint project between Yad Vashem and Martin Schoeller, "Survivors: Faces of Life after the Holocaust"](https://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/martinschoeller-yitzchak-arad.jpg "Dr. Yitzhak Arad photographed for the joint project between Yad Vashem and Martin Schoeller, "Survivors: Faces of Life after the Holocaust"")
