David Galante, 94, Auschwitz survivor who taught about the Holocaust after a 50-year silence

BUENOS AIRES (JTA) — It took 50 years for David Galante to begin talking about his experience at Auschwitz.

Born to a Sephardic family in Rhodes in 1925, Galante studied in a Jewish school as a child, learning Italian, French and Hebrew. He was a teenager when he arrived at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. When he was liberated a year later, he weighed just 83 pounds and had the number B 7328 tattooed on his arm.

“The Russian soldiers, especially female soldiers, cried their eyes out and some of them vomited when entering and saw,” he recalled in an interview.