A Polish-Israeli poet, writer, and translator, Halina Birenbaum is a Holocaust survivor born in Warsaw, Poland. Confined as a child to the Warsaw Ghetto, she survived Majdanek, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Neustadt-Glewe, from which she was liberated in May 1945, and emigrated to Israel in 1947. Her memoir Hope Is the Last to Die, first published in Polish in 1967, has been translated into English, German, French, and other languages. She writes in both Polish and Hebrew. In 1999 the President of Poland awarded her the Order of Officer of Polonia Restituta, and in 2018 the city of Warsaw named her an honorary citizen.
