One of the greatest Israeli writers, Aharon Appelfeld (1932-2018) was born in Bukovina, region of the kingdom of Romania, now Ukraine. In 1941, his mother was murdered by the Nazis and he was deported with his father to a forced labor camp in Transnistria. He escaped and hid for three years, before joining the Soviet Army as a cook. After the war, he spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy, before immigrating in 1946 to Palestine. He was reunited with his father twenty years later, and the reunion was so emotional that he has never been able to write about it. As he didn’t want to write in German, his mother tongue, he learned Hebrew and began writing short stories and novels. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and taught literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Most of his work focuses on Jewish life in Europe before, during and after World War II. He received several awards.