She survived Auschwitz at 19—then spent 80 years teaching children how to remember without breaking.
September 8, 1925. Łódź, Poland.
A girl is born to a Jewish family and named Izabella Rubinstein. Her childhood is ordinary, filled with school, family, and the vibrant Jewish culture of pre-war Poland.
Then everything ends.
By her teenage years, the Nazis have invaded. Her family is forced into the Radom ghetto—a walled prison where Jews are crammed into impossibly small spaces, starved, and worked to death. Izabella is just 14 years old when her world becomes a cage.
But even in hell, resistance exists. Izabella joins the underground movement, risking her life to fight back in whatever small ways are possible. Smuggling information. Providing aid. Refusing to surrender hope even as death surrounds her.
In 1943, at 18 years old, she is arrested. Sent to Auschwitz.
If you know anything about Auschwitz, you know most people who arrived there died within hours. The trains would pull up to the selection ramp. Nazi doctors would glance at each person—left or right, life or death. The elderly, the young, the weak: straight to the gas chambers.
Izabella was sent to the right. Chosen for slave labor. She survived selection, but survival at Auschwitz meant living through unspeakable horror every single day.
She endured Auschwitz. Then, as the Soviet army approached in 1945, she was forced on a death march to Ravens brück concentration camp. From there, to Malc how, a sub-camp where prisoners were worked until they collapsed.
On May 2, 1945—just days before Germany’s surrender—Izabella Rubinstein was liberated by Allied forces.
She was 19 years old. Most of her family was dead. Her childhood was gone. Her home had been destroyed. Everything she’d known had been systematically erased.
What do you do when you’ve survived the unsurvivable? When you’re 19 and have witnessed more death than most people see in a lifetime? When the world that destroyed everything you loved is suddenly, impossibly, over?
Some survivors couldn’t speak about what happened. The trauma was too deep. Some tried to forget. Some rebuilt their lives in silence.
Izabella Rubinstein—who would become Bats heva Dagan in Israel—chose differently.
She chose to remember. And more than that, she chose to teach.
After the war, she made her way to Mandatory Palestine (soon to become Israel) in 1947. She married. She and her husband took the Hebrew surname Dagan, marking a new beginning. She studied, became a teacher, then an educational psychologist.
And then she confronted the question that would define her life’s work: How do you teach children about the Holocaust?
How do you tell a child about gas chambers without traumatizing them? How do you explain humanity’s capacity for evil without destroying their faith in humanity? How do you preserve memory without passing on unbearable pain?
Bats heva Dagan spent decades developing the answer.
She created age-appropriate educational methods that were truthful but gentle. She wrote books for children that acknowledged the horror without drowning them in it. She crafted poems that carried memory forward with care. She developed curricula that balanced honesty with hope.
She understood something crucial: if Holocaust education traumatizes children, they’ll turn away from it. But if you can reach them at the right level, at the right age, with the right balance of truth and compassion, they’ll carry that knowledge forward.
They’ll become witnesses to the witnesses. Keepers of memory. Protectors against forgetting.
She traveled to schools across Israel and around the world. She spoke to countless students—young children, teenagers, adults. She shared her story not with bitterness, though she had every right to bitterness, but with purpose.
“I survived,” she would say, “so I could tell you. So you would know. So you would remember for those who cannot.”
She continued this work into her nineties. Even as her body aged, her mission never wavered. In 2023, at 97 years old, she was still meeting with students, still teaching, still ensuring that the six million murdered in the Holocaust would not be forgotten.
On January 25, 2024, Bats heva Dagan passed away at age 98 in Israel.
Her death, at such an advanced age, after such a full life, might seem like a natural ending to an extraordinary story. And it is. But it’s also a countdown we need to recognize: the last survivors of the Holocaust are dying.
Bats heva Dagan was one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz. She lived 79 years after liberation—nearly four times longer than she’d been alive when she entered that camp. She used every single one of those years to fight forgetting.
But now she’s gone. And every year, more survivors die. Soon, there will be no one left who can say, “I was there. I saw it. This happened.”
That’s why Bats heva Dagan’s educational work matters even more now. She didn’t just survive and tell her story. She created systems, methods, books, and curricula that will continue teaching long after the last survivor is gone.
She built a bridge from lived memory to learned memory. From testimony to education. From “I remember” to “we remember.”
In Jewish tradition, when someone dies, we say “May their memory be a blessing”—Zichrona livracha. It means: may the fact that this person lived bring blessing to the world. May their memory be a source of good.
Bats heva Dagan’s memory is exactly that. A blessing. A gift. A light built from the darkest place imaginable.
She proved that survival alone is not enough—what matters is what you build with the life you’re given. She could have lived quietly, nursed her trauma privately, and no one would have blamed her.
Instead, she chose to face her memories every single day. To relive them in classrooms. To speak the names of the dead. To carry the weight so that children could learn without being crushed by it.
That’s not just survival. That’s heroism.
Every child who learns about the Holocaust through methods that don’t traumatize them—that’s Bats heva Dagan’s legacy.
Every person who understands that remembrance is an act of love, not just grief—that’s her teaching.
Every time someone says “Never forget” and actually means it, actually acts on it—that’s the world she built.
Bats heva Dagan survived Auschwitz at 19. But she didn’t just survive. She transformed her survival into education, her trauma into teaching, her memories into bridges between past and future.
She taught us that memory itself is a form of resistance. That education can be an act of love. That even from the darkest places, it’s possible to build light.
The camps tried to erase her. They failed. She lived to 98, taught thousands, wrote books that will outlive us all, and ensured that millions who were murdered will never be forgotten.
Zichrona livracha. May her memory be a blessing.
And may we honor that blessing by never forgetting—and by teaching our children to never forget.
