Benjamín Kedar was born 02.09.1938 in Nitra, into a Jewish family of two physicians. Both parents studied in Prague, his mother came from Prague.
His father returned to Slovakia, to Nitra, where he worked as a director of a Jewish hospital. His older sister Helene Doris was born in 1934. The family on his father’s side died during the Holocaust, while on his mother’s side, only one sister survived and was saved thanks to marrying a foreign husband and moving into England. During the period of the Slovak state, the witnesses’ father initially worked as a district physician, which gave him the status of an economically useful Jew, and the family managed to avoid deportation for a long time. By 1944, however, these Jews were also threatened with deportation and the family had to go into hiding. They moved between several hiding places and, despite the dramatic circumstances, managed to survive the war together. In 1949, the family decided to emigrate to Israel. Benjamin graduated from high school there and subsequently studied history; thanks to good results he was allowed to continue his studies at the University of Yale, focusing mainly on the Crusades and medieval history, but he is also interested in world history, the history of India and China. When he became head of the School of History at the University of Jerusalem, he introduced a compulsory course in world history. He has been married twice; his first wife is a psychologist, and one of their sons is also a psychologist. His second wife was an art historian specializing in the Middle Ages; the historian wrote a book about their life together. He currently lives in Israel, in Jerusalem.
The full story of the witness can be found in the online archive Memory of Nations.