I was not hit once during the war but I lost all of my family
Shaul Gattenyo was born on 21 August 1940 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. His parents Vinka and Leo Gatenjo were Sephardi Jews. In 1941, following the occupation of Serbia, the family moved to the Macedonian city of Skopje. After the annexation of a part of Macedonia by Bulgaria in March 1943, Jews were concentrated in the Monopoly camp in Skopje, from where they were being deported to Treblinka. Šaul became seriously ill at that time and his mother secretly passed him over to a former nanny, Zora Pičulin from Slovenia. She had gone into hiding with the boy since March 1943 in the Letnica monastery near the Macedonian-Kosovar border. Most of the members of the Gatenjo family died in extermination or concentration camps (Treblinka, Auschwitz, Jasenovac, Sajmište). After the war, Ester Biti, the sister of his grandmother and her husband Chananja took care of the boy. He joined them on their journey to Israel in 1948. He studied mathematics and worked as high-school teacher in Jerusalem. Ever since the 1970s, he paid annual visits to his savior Zora in her hometown of Ljubljana. In 1975, Zora Pičulin was awarded the Righteous Among the Nations honorific by the Yad Vashem memorial. She died in 1998. Šaul Gattenyo collaborates as a volunteer with the Yad Vashem memorial and tells his life story there.