Daniel Louz speaks at Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the annual March of the Living, May 2024. Photo: Screenshot

Less than two weeks after lighting a Holocaust Remembrance Day torch and saying the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel was scarier than the Nazis’ genocide of European Jews, Daniel Louz, who escaped Nazi persecution as a child and survived the Hamas massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri eight decades later, has died at 92.

The nonagenarian lit a torch at the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, where the annual Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Rally has been held for decades. In an interview with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper before the ceremony, he spoke prophetically – and with humor – about his declining health.

“You see me happy and smiling in the photo, but my health is really not good,” he said. “Soon I will have to return my soul to the Creator, but I make an effort for the camera.”

Born in France, Louz was a child when Nazi Germany invaded in 1940. He and his family were held in three concentration camps in France, separated for years between different camps, with his mother and sister in one place and his father in another. The family survived, but most of his relatives, including 10 aunts and uncles and two cousins, did not. 

Two years ago, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Louz visited Auschwitz-Birkenau with the annual March of the Living, where he also took part in a torch-lighting ceremony.

Louz immigrated to Israel in 1949. He first lived on Kibbutz Nirim in the Negev and later made his home at Kibbutz Be’eri. 

“I began to breathe again,” Louz said of the move to Israel. 

Louz described the events of Oct. 7, 2023, in Be’eri, one of the communities hit hardest during the Hamas-led attack. On Oct. 6, like many Be’eri residents, Louz marked the kibbutz’s anniversary. The next morning, Hamas terrorists stormed the community. Of the kibbutz’s roughly 1,200 residents, 101 were murdered and 30 were kidnapped. Hundreds of homes were destroyed and more than two years later, most of the community is still living elsewhere.

Louz was inside his home as the attack unfolded.

“We were already hostages in our own home, when Hamas terrorists entered the kibbutz,” he said. 

“It was a deathly fear. It was even scarier than I remember as a child during that war,” he added.

Louz said he had not recovered from the trauma of the attack and expressed his hope for an end to war, adding that while he no longer believed he would live to see peace himself, he hoped his grandchildren would.

At Birkenau, Louz tied the memory of the Holocaust directly to the massacre in southern Israel.

“We, the survivors of the Holocaust, who established a home and a state – that constitute our great victory over the Nazis and antisemitism – light this torch in memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, and in memory of those murdered on Oct. 7,” he said, his voice shaking.

Approximately 2,500 Holocaust survivors were in areas directly affected by Oct 7, according to Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. Roughly 2,000 of these survivors were forced to evacuate their homes from the Gaza envelope and northern Israel due to the subsequent war.