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The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the August 3
a Holocaust survivor who fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and Israel’s War of Independence before becoming a leader in the Israeli aeronautics industry
He was a longtime supporter of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw
Zigi traveled from his home in Tel Aviv to Los Angeles to record the USC Shoah Foundation’s first Hebrew-language Dimensions in Testimony
an interactive biography where viewers ask genocide survivors questions and receive answers in real time
Earlier in 2016 he recorded his video testimony for the Visual History Archive in English; it is now featured on the USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness educational platform and used in classrooms around the world
Zigi was born Szulem Czygielman in 1926 to a Reform Jewish family in Lublin
He was 13 years old in 1939 when the German invasion brought persecution to the Jews of Lublin
Zigi recalled being shoved off the sidewalk by a young Nazi while he was walking on Lubartowska Street in Lublin
he decided he was not going to have his identity decided by the Nazis
He tore off the white armband with the blue Star of David that he had been forced to wear
father and twin brother Avraham and headed to his mother’s hometown of Bełżyce
Zigi was able to get a job in an electrical plant and avoid slave labor
amid a Nazi action to send thousands of Jews from Bełżyce to the Majdanek and Sobibor death camps
Zigi’s parents devised a plan to split up the family in the hope that some of them would survive
Zigi soon learned that his father had been murdered in a massacre
finding his body in a pool of blood in front of the Bełżyce synagogue
buried their father and some 150 others with their own hands
Zigi’s mother decided that her sons would be safer in Warsaw
He and his brother boarded a train for the capital
His brother was discovered and murdered in 1943
Subsequently known as Jerzy Eugeniusz Godlewski
Zigi lived with Poles and joined the Polish Home Army to train as a resistance fighter
He was critically wounded in the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944
when the Polish Home Army unsuccessfully attempted to defeat German troops before the Soviet army arrived to liberate the capital in January 1945
After liberation and months of recovery in Krakow
He lived in a displaced persons camp for two years
training fellow survivors to fight while they were waiting to leave for Palestine
joining the war with neighboring Arab countries that followed Israel’s declaration of independence
He changed his name to Nimrod Ariav (affectionately known as Zigi to his friends) and served in the Israeli Air Force for seven years
He rose to the top ranks of Israel Aerospace Industries and later started his own civilian aircraft company with branches all over the world
Zigi was married to Holocaust survivor Odette (Finkental) Ariav
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the first deportation train set out from Eisenach for the Belzyce Ghetto
were deported a few months later to Theresienstadt
The remaining few Jews were deported a short time later
Very few members of Eisenach’s Jewish community survived
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