MELBOURNE, Australia (VINnews) — Berish (Berysz) Orbach, a 105-year-old Holocaust survivor and one of the last people smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, has died in Melbourne.

Until just months before his passing, Orbach remained active and fully lucid, continuing to share firsthand memories of Nazi-occupied Poland and the destruction of European Jewry.

Born in Poland in 1920, Orbach faced tragedy early in life when his mother, Rivka, died of typhus while he was still an infant. He was raised in a traditional Jewish home and studied in a cheder, memories he was still able to recount in detail more than a century later.

During World War II, Orbach was confined to the Warsaw Ghetto, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were subjected to starvation, disease, and deportation. In March 1943, shortly before the uprising began, he escaped with the help of his brother Mordechai, who was involved in the anti-Nazi underground.

Mordechai secured forged identity papers and a Polish police uniform for his brother, enabling him to slip out of the ghetto. Orbach spent the remainder of the war hiding in shelters, fully aware that discovery would mean immediate execution.

“If the Germans had found me, they would have shot me on the spot, like my brother,” he later recalled.

Mordechai, who played a role in resistance efforts, was eventually captured and murdered. Aside from a sister who had emigrated to the Land of Israel before the war, Orbach lost his entire family in the Holocaust.

After the war, with no family remaining in Poland, Orbach contacted an uncle living in Australia. He emigrated to Melbourne in 1947, part of a broader wave of Holocaust survivors seeking to rebuild their lives far from Europe.

In Australia, he established a successful knitting business and became a respected member of the local Jewish community. In 1955, he married his wife, Tova, who died 15 years ago.

Even in his later years, Orbach remained engaged with community life. Just last August, he marked his 105th birthday at a large celebration attended by friends and community members. He received congratulatory letters from King Charles III, Australia’s prime minister, and other public figures.

Orbach’s life spanned more than a century of Jewish history—from prewar Europe, through the Holocaust, to rebuilding in the diaspora. His testimony, preserved in archives and shared with younger generations, stands as a lasting record of both devastation and survival.

He is survived by his children, grandchildren, and extended family.

His death marks the loss of a direct witness to one of the Holocaust’s defining chapters, as the number of living survivors continues to dwindle.