Hope Is the Last to Die: A Coming of Age Under Nazi Terror

Halina Birenbaum (born 1929, Warsaw, Poland) is a Polish-Israeli poet and Holocaust survivor whose testimony and verse have borne witness to the destruction of Polish Jewry for over seven decades. Deported as a child to the Warsaw Ghetto, she survived Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and Neustadt-Glewe before immigrating to Israel in 1947. Her memoir Hope Is the Last to Die (1967) became a foundational Holocaust document. Her poetry distills grief, memory, and miraculous survival through spare, powerful verse, and her collections include I'm Still Alive (1992) and This Burning Land (1998). She has received honorary doctorates from Polish universities and has dedicated her life to bearing witness in schools and institutions worldwide.