Moshe Flinker (1926–1944)

Moshe Ze'ev Flinker was born in The Hague, Netherlands, one of seven children in a wealthy Orthodox Jewish family of Polish origins. In 1942, to escape the Nazi Occupation of Holland in World War II, the Flinkers fled to Belgium and lived in hiding under false identities. Moshe was deeply religious and a gifted linguist who learned eight languages. He planned to move to Palestine and become a diplomat, and studied Arabic for this purpose. He kept a diary while in hiding from 1941 to 1943. The Flinker family was betrayed in 1944 and many of them were caught and sent to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. His mother Mindel was murdered on arrival. Moshe and his father Eliezer spent several months in the camp before being transferred to Echterdingen forced labor camp, where they both contracted typhus. From there, they were sent to Bergen- Belsen, where they both died. Moshe was 18 years old. His younger brother and five sisters survived the war, and arranged for Yad Vashem to publish his diary in Hebrew in 1958. In 1965, it was published in English as Young Moshe's Diary: The Spiritual Torment of a Jewish Boy in Nazi Europe.