Not long ago, Dan Hadani, a veteran journalist and photographer came to visit the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, the new home of the enormous collection of photographs he amassed over his long career. The Dan Hadani Collection is a photographic archive that covers almost every event in the history of the State of Israel during a critical period – from the late 1960s until the year 2000. The archive was handed over to the Library in a meticulously organized state. This was his life’s work, and to maintain its relevance as well as the photos themselves, Hadani decided to transfer the archive in its entirety to the National Library, where the majority of the photos would be made accessible digitally on the NLI website.
In August 2024, Hadani celebrated his 100th birthday. He is sharp, his stories are fascinating, and he has many to tell. He’s had a successful career as a photographer and journalist, but his life story is extraordinary, even aside from that: It includes a happy childhood, as well as years spent in a ghetto, in labor camps, and in an extermination camp, before later creating a new life in Israel, where he reinvented himself more than once. Hadani is a special man. You would never know he was 100 years old from his sharp thinking and eloquence. He has a realistic outlook and doesn’t waste time on regrets or asking questions about the past.

What Might Have Been
Twice, Dan Hadani’s family found themselves en route to the Land of Israel, equipped with the necessary certificates granting entry. In 1925, when Dan was still a baby, his family was on its way to a ship bound for Mandatory Palestine. At the port, they happened to meet a good friend of his father’s who had fled there previously and returned. He told them about pogroms by Arabs against the Jews settling in the Promised Land. He made them swear they’d return to Poland and not risk their lives, and that’s exactly what they did. The second time was in 1936. Once all their belongings were finally packed up, Dan’s father Kalman contracted a serious gallbladder infection and their trip was canceled.
We asked Hadani how he felt about his family nearly saving themselves from the awful fate of European Jewry during World War II, and whether he felt sad or angry that in the end, this did not come to pass. He responded decisively, “That was our fate.”

Dan Hadani was born just over a hundred years ago, in 1924, as Dunek Zloczewski, in Lodz, Poland. His nuclear family comprised four people – himself, his sister, and their parents. His father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress. “I grew up in a Jewish and very Zionist home. My father, Kalman, was active in the Poale Tzion party, and as a child, I often went with him to training sessions for groups that were headed to Israel,” he recalls. His mother, Lea, had come from a German-speaking family. Dan and his sister Sabina, who was three years older, knew German fluently, a fact that would save their lives on more than one occasion later on. At the center of their home was a large sewing table where both parents, experts in the craft, used to work. From them, Dan learned about the integrity, professionalism, and love that were part of the work and atmosphere in the home where he grew up. It was a home full of life, warmth and love. When he reminisces about life before the war, he pictures his mother, who used to wait for him every day as he returned from school. They used to prepare lunch together. He learned how to cook by watching what she used to do. To this day, every time Hadani cooks, he is reminded of his mother.
His father Kalman was a special man: an expert craftsman, an active Zionist, and a volunteer for the “Linat Hatzedek” organization which offered first aid to the needy, particularly during nighttime hours. The organization’s offices were housed in their local synagogue. Together, Hadani and his father collected stamps and cultivated an extensive collection that included stamps from all over Europe, including Nazi Germany. The magnificent collection was left behind in Auschwitz along with the rest of the family’s belongings that had been packed in suitcases and confiscated when they were taken from the ghetto in 1944.
The Pogroms Were Just the Beginning
When Hadani tells the story of his childhood in Poland, antisemitism is an inseparable part of it. One example took place one Saturday, during the family’s usual walk to the large public park where he used to play chess. A pogrom broke out suddenly, instigated by Polish hooligans targeting local Jews. Many of those who weren’t killed or injured by the rioters were crushed in the panic as a mass of people rushed toward the park’s exit gate. Hadani and his family weren’t targeted directly because they didn’t appear visibly Jewish, but they were nearly trampled by the fearful mob, managing to get away by the skin of their teeth.
“There was a great deal of antisemitism everywhere,” he says. “More than once, I was accused of killing Jesus, as if thousands of years hadn’t passed.” Growing up in a home that was a place for social, business, and political gatherings, he heard stories of exploitation and fraud that some Jews bragged about. He remembers one story about a tailor who was proud of how he managed to sell a suit he was eager to be rid of to a Polish man. The suit was several sizes too large for him. Every time the Pole looked in the mirror, the tailor pulled the suit in a different direction. Hadani’s parents condemned that sort of behavior, and he developed an aversion to any type of dishonesty.
The Early Days of World War II
Ten days after Poland was conquered by the German army, the Nazis reached Lodz and word spread that they would kill all Jewish men of certain ages. That day is burned into Hadani’s memory. Together with his family, he tried to flee toward Warsaw, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews, without success. The Germans quickly took control over the masses of people trying to flee. Hadani’s family were not visibly Jewish and spoke excellent German, and so they managed to escape the abuses, but that was the first time Hadani witnessed the Nazi barbarism, which still haunts his nightmares to this day: “They undressed elderly Jews, left them with only their tzitzit and beat them in their private parts. They killed people indiscriminately on the sides of the roads,” he recalls, “In my mind I can still see one incident that took place there – a group of three Germans was standing around one Jew, and with tweezers, they removed the hears on his head one by one so that all that remained was the shape of a swastika. It was total sadism and it was there I understood – people are animals.”
For Hadani’s parents, who had great appreciation for German culture, it was extremely difficult to cope with the actions of the Germans, whom they had always seen as a cultured and civilized people. What they saw in those days broke their hearts. Hadani’s father, Kalman, was never himself again and he ultimately died of that heartbreak in 1942, as he lay starving and ill in the Lodz Ghetto.
Hadani doesn’t remember much from the family’s four long years in the Lodz Ghetto, aside from how his father wasted away and died. “We were in survival mode, every man for himself,” he says. “When I moved to Israel, they asked me why we didn’t do anything. How can you explain that you were on an island, cut off ftrom the world?! The Germans slowly got us used to the fact that this was our reality.”
He remembers suffering from hunger in the ghetto, though his family tried to discreetly grow some vegetables on their improvised patio. Food rations were meager – one slice of bread for breakfast and one for dinner. “I am sure my parents took food from their allowance and gave it to me and my sister. I have no proof of this, but I felt it.” He also cannot forget those who took their own lives by throwing themselves on the ghetto’s electric fence. Like most residents of the Lodz Ghetto, he and his sister needed to work for the German army. The only pictures he has from those years are from the factory where they worked making boots for the German soldiers.


Dr. Mengele’s Selections
Hadani has written extensively about the nightmarish journey from the ghetto to Auschwitz, on a website that he himself set up: “I didn’t want to write a book because I think more people will read it this way,” he explains. Until that moment, throughout all their time in the ghetto, his mother and sister were never apart from him. In the utter chaos upon the train’s arrival at the platform, he was immediately separated from them. His mother was murdered that day. As far as he was able to clarify, his sister was murdered a few months later in one of the labor camps. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the whole family and miss them. I wasn’t even able to say goodbye to my mother or sister.” Unlike his family, Hadani went through several different labor camps and survived. In each camp, he says miracles, coincidences, luck, and wits helped him stay alive.
After a few weeks in Auschwitz, Dr. Mengele conducted a selection. To prevent any chance of an uprising by the prisoners, the abuse began days before. “We were naked and needed to do frog jumps for hours. Whoever wasn’t up to it received fatal blows.” They were organized into groups of five for the selection by Dr. Mengele, who tended not to speak but merely lift his finger to point at whoever needed to leave the row and join those headed for immediate extermination. When he got to Hadani, Mengele pointed in his direction. Hadani asked in fluent German, “Do you mean me?” Mengele responded, “Keep standing, dog.” The man behind Hadani, the last in the group of five, was out of luck that day and murdered in that very same selection.
Whoever passed the selection was chosen for harsh labor at the factories at the Braunschweig camp, which were converted during the war to create German tanks. The cold temperatures during the winter of 1944 were so extreme that many people’s toes froze. “People would be woken in the night by rats biting them, which they only discovered when the rats moved from the frozen flesh to the living flesh, then the person would wake up screaming. It was awful,” Hadani describes. With luck and resourcefulness, he had found pieces of an empty cement bag made out of several layers of paper, and he used these to wrap his feet and protect them from the cold and the rats.
A few days later, he was transferred to a labor camp in a neighboring town. One of the managers there, Meister Haler, under whom Hadani worked, was a member of the Nazi party. Haler was known for his barbarism and even the other Germans feared him. “I worked on the night shift, from 6 PM till 6 AM, just like that Meister, and he showed me what I needed to do, how to raise a 42 kilo hunk of iron, bring it towards the lathe at a certain angle, and bind it to its place so that the lathe would process it to the desired size. I remembered how he held the iron at a special angle and I did it exactly the way he did.”
Thanks to his quick absorption, Hadani understood what was required of him. Even though he had never before worked in a technical profession, and he only weighed around 40 kilos at the time, within a few days he managed to produce quite a good yield. Because of his fluent German, the two were able to converse, and during his long night shifts, Meister would tell him about his life and how he ended up in the Nazi party. “Once, he even brought me a slice of bread. Who ever heard of such a thing? Or even some cocoa substitute that they had in the canteen, which they called Alsace-Cacao. It was unbelievable!” Small moments like that gave him strength and hope during the hardest days.
“I rejoiced but I didn’t know why”
Hadani was transferred to harsh labor in several different camps. On the way to one of them, he was forced to join in a death march, which he survived. Towards the end of the war, he was at the Ravensbrück concentration camp as part of a group that was to be exchanged, possibly with German prisoners of war. The SS officers forced the group to walk through the forest towards another camp. “I was sure that they’d murder us there,” he says, “but no, there were cabins that belonged to the League of Nations there where they handed us parcels of food and cigarettes. Here, too, the young man’s hard-earned wisdom saved his life. “You need to remember, we’re talking about people who had been starving for months and years. To suddenly stuff yourself with that kind of food could be dangerous. I understood that. I simply knew it to be true.” The other starved camp prisoners ate ravenously and suffered severe diarrhea. Some never recovered. “I knew, for example, that I should get rid of the canned meat and keep the dry biscuits, which I ate slowly.”
When he saw the American soldiers enter the camp gates to liberate him, he was too exhausted to stand up. “I rejoiced, but I didn’t know why,” he says. After a few days regaining his strength, he gradually began to understand that he was once again a free man. Yet with that understanding, and upon his return home to Lodz, he knew that he had no one left in the world. He was on his own.
In the house where they had lived in the Lodz Ghetto, there was a small storeroom where he found the few photographs he still has of himself and his family from their time there. These were photographed in secret, practically the only tangible reminder of his life back then. From there, he ended up in the displaced persons camps. He can’t forget the rivalry he witnessed between the various groups of survivors: “If there, in the camps, people from Poale Tzion couldn’t speak with people from Beitar, and there were so many arguments and so much tension, and we were all Holocaust survivors, how could we possibly run a country?”
Although he had other options, it was clear to Hadani that he would fulfill his parents’ unwritten will, realize their Zionist dreams, and go live in Israel. He was accepted to join a maritime training course taking place in Italy, without knowing a word of Italian or any of the other people. However, Hadani passed the course with flying colors, and the day after he landed in Israel, he enlisted in the newly formed Israeli Navy. “The hardest thing was the way we – the Holocaust survivors – were treated by the tsabarim [native-born Israelis]. They treated us like idiots, asking things like ‘Why didn’t you object?’ How can you possibly explain to well-fed people what it means to suffer years of starvation?”

In Israel, it took him some time to adjust to his new life. “Even when I was a soldier in the army, I was hungry. After all, I didn’t have a home to go to or anyone else in the world. I would stay on the army base even during vacations when I was on leave so that at least I had something to eat and somewhere to sleep.” Hadani served in the IDF until he was honorably discharged at forty years old, at the rank of major. He then he began a new career as a newspaper photographer, establishing the IPPA press agency and even writing news articles. For someone who had never learned Hebrew in any organized manner, he felt a sense of pride and triumph over the horrible circumstances of his early life.

“I am among the only ones who can still speak about it”
What was going through his mind at the end of World War II, when he was only 21 years old? What did he feel when he discovered that he was left all alone in the world without a single relative, with barely any mementos from before the war? Hadani has very few photographs in his possession from his childhood and youth, barely any souvenirs of all his family relatives who perished. Perhaps that’s why he became a such a curious documentarian and cataloger over the years, organized and meticulous, keeping records of everything that happened in the young country.

For years, Hadani didn’t speak about what he went through during the Holocaust. “I didn’t want to reopen the wound. I occupied myself with surviving and was also embarrassed to speak about it, because of how the native Israelis treated me,” he explains. It was only once he turned 92 that he first agreed to return to Poland, and that was when the floodgates opened. Ever since, he has spoken to anyone willing to listen. He also made sure to upload his story from the Holocaust period to his website, which he built himself at the age of 99. “I understand that I need to speak about it and I am among the only ones who still can! Even if it isn’t easy for me. It takes me back to the past, and I have nightmares about it.”

When Hadani is asked about October 7, he responds, “For me, that was a Holocaust day. One day! I woke up in the morning and listened to the radio, I heard what they were saying and immediately shut it off. I thought it couldn’t be. But then I was curious and turned it back on and remembered – this is how the Holocaust felt.”
Hadani came to tell his story as part of the Zikaron Ba’salon (“a memory in the living room”) Holocaust commemoration initiative, at the National Library, which houses his vast and monumental archive of photographs. At the Library and in its online catalog, the collection is accessible to all. “I get some satisfaction from knowing that the huge archive of photos that I worked on all my life is being kept safe at the National Library. It gives me pride to know that something will be left after me.”
Dan Hadani’s life arguably contains more than one life story, and he hopes that the country that he dreamed of and was so happy to serve and be part of will continue to be faithful to the same values that guided him throughout his life.
You can watch this special interview held with Dan Hadani in Hebrew at the National Library. Auto-generated English subtitles are available: