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| Tuly Ziv and his son, Noam |
Some 60 years ago, on the night between May 31 and June 1, Pinchas Zacklikovsky returned to his home in Bnei Brak, entered his 10-year-old son Tuly's room, and told him quietly and calmly: "Tonight I cremated Eichmann."Zacklikovsky, a professional oven-builder, who spent the war years in the Lodz Ghetto and Buchenwald Concentration Camp, didn't depart from his routine. "The next day dad went to work like nothing had happened," Tuly says. "They asked him 'how was it?' and he answered 'I turned on the oven, put the body in, and that was that. All I did was turn Eichmann into ashes.'"
In 1940, Nazi arch criminal Adolf Eichmann visited the Lodz Ghetto in order to monitor up close the operation to expel the Jews, as the preliminary step towards the implementation of the Final Solution. Someone who saw the senior Nazi officer from a distance was Pinchas Zacklikovsky, then a young man of 20.
Pinchas Zacklilkovsky was born in 1920 in Poland to a wealthy family of Gur Hasidim. He was raised alongside four brothers and sisters, and like every Jew in Europe was greatly shaken by the outbreak of World War II. At the beginning he escaped on his own, wandered throughout Poland in areas that were then controlled by the Soviet Union, in an attempt to escape from the clutches of the Nazis, but in the end, he decided to return to his family and be with them during those dreadful times.
From the Lodz Ghetto he was transferred to the Czestochowa Ghetto and in 1944 he was sent to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. "They beat his father to death right before his eyes," Tuly says. In an interview with the newspaper Yom HaShishi in 1990, Zacklilkowsky said that, after the American army liberated the Concentration Camp from the Nazis, he angrily set upon a German officer who had tortured him, and ripped out both of his eyes.
He made aliyah in 1946 on the Enzo Sereni ship, but was then expelled with the other "illegal" immigrants to Cyprus and was afterwards imprisoned in the Atlit Detention Camp. Afterwards he was recruited into the Etzel, and during the War of Independence he served in the Givati Brigade. He met Sara Levitt Neuman, who was born in 1926 and survived Auschwitz, via mutual acquaintances. They married and made their home in Bnei Brak.