Zvi was the youngest of David and Esther Koplowicz's seven children. The family lived in Lodz, where David had a factory and store for paper products and typewriters. World War II broke out when Zvi was fifteen years old.
On 1 May 1940 the Koplowicz family was confined in the Lodz ghetto together with all the city's Jews. Zvi worked in the warehouse of one of the typewriter factories. His parents were deemed unfit to work and received a deportation order. On the day of the transport, Nazi officers headed by Hans Biebow, head of the Lodz Ghetto Administration, visited Zvi's factory. Deciding that he had nothing to lose, Zvi approached Biebow and asked to be added to his parents' deportation. Biebow retorted scornfully, and ignored his request. After the visit was over, the Jewish factory managers wrote a letter to Judenrat head Mordechai Rumkowski, asking him to get Zvi's parents released from the transport. The request was granted and ten days later, Zvi and his parents moved to another apartment and started working making carpets from rag strips. Zvi's parents died in 1942. When the Lodz ghetto was liquidated in 1944, Zvi was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
While the daily bread ration was being distributed in the camp one morning, a Russian prisoner passed by holding a siddur (prayer book) that he had found next to the crematorium. After negotiating a price, Zvi "bought" the siddur in exchange for his bread ration. Recalling this, he said: "Only someone who knows what it means to be hungry can understand the significance of what I did. It's like donating a kidney… Why did I do it? I don't know." He was scared to leave the siddur in his barracks, and kept it with him at all times. During roll-call, standing in rows of five, the prisoners would pass the siddur between them in order to safeguard it.
Three months later Zvi was transferred to the Braunschweig camp, and there too, the siddur would be passed from one prisoner to the other between the rows, to avoid having it confiscated. Zvi was sent to various other camps until he was liberated at Wobelin on the verge of collapse. During all this time, he never relinquished the siddur. Zvi recuperated in Sweden, and then joined "Bachad" (Brit Halutzim Dati'im, a religious pioneer movement) in Granna. He married Chaya Weiss, a Holocaust survivor from Sighet, and together they sailed to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) on the Ulua. After six weeks at sea, the boat was intercepted by the British and its passengers taken to a detention camp in Cyprus. They received their belongings several days later, but to Zvi's dismay, the precious siddur that had accompanied him through all his trials and tribulations, was missing. Coming to the camp synagogue to pray one day, Zvi saw another Jew holding his siddur. At first, the Jew refused to return the siddur due to the lack of proof of ownership, but he eventually relented after other Jews in the synagogue intervened. The siddur was restored to Zvi, and rebound. Zvi and Chaya immigrated to Eretz Israel in March 1948.
In 1989, Zvi donated the siddur to Yad Vashem for posterity. He wrote the story behind the siddur on the flyleaf, and inscribed the names of his family members who had been murdered in the Holocaust, concluding: "Today I donate this special siddur to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as a reminder for future generations."
![Zvi Koplowicz with fellow "Bachad" members after the war](https://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/Img24188.jpg "Zvi Koplowicz with fellow "Bachad" members after the war")
_2.jpg?itok=gYdTa_Sy "The Siddur (Prayer Book) that Gabriele Kohn Received after Liberation")
