Yesterday, Friday, Professor Yehuda Bauer passed away in a retirement home in Jerusalem at the age of 98. Yehuda Bauer was born Martin Bauer in Prague in 1926. At the last moment, on 15 March 1939, the day the German Wehrmacht invaded Prague, the Bauer family finally managed to leave on their long-planned emigration to Palestine.

Yehuda Bauer studied history and later taught at various universities. As a professor of Holocaust Studies and an important mentor, he advised and shaped the Yad Vashem Memorial and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) for many years. The IHRA now has 34 member states. In Berlin, Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, paid tribute to Yehuda Bauer as follows:

“Yehuda Bauer was well-known worldwide as one of the greatest and most impressive Holocaust scholars. The Holocaust became his lifelong focus. From the very start, his research and personal commitment were determined by the awareness that he had escaped the Holocaust at the last moment. This heightened his solidarity with the survivors and his commitment to those who were murdered. His advice, his knowledge and expertise, and his human inspiration, will be remembered by the survivors of the Holocaust and many of his colleagues.

As a historian and contemporary witness, he repeatedly confronted himself and the world with deeply probing questions, the most important of which remains:

Have we learned from history?”