The Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell died on Sunday June 21st 2020, at the age of 85. Born into a Jewish family in the historic town of Przemyśl in south-west Poland, in April 1935, his life could have stepped out of the pages of a novel. At the age of seven, after his mother and sister had been killed by the Nazis, he was smuggled to the nearby city of Lwów – then in Poland, now called Lviv and in Ukraine – where he was brought up as a Catholic and was able to survive the rest of the war. After the end of World War II he went to live and study in France, attending school in Avignon in the south of France, before moving to the new state of Israel in 1951 when aged 16.
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