Otto Dov Kulka, a historian of the Holocaust at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, died Jan. 29 in Jerusalem. He was 87.

At age 31, he was the youngest survivor of Auschwitz to testify in 1964 in a trial of nearly two dozen former SS officers who had served at that extermination camp. He delivered a moving account of how Jewish inmates had sung Hebrew hymns before being loaded onto trucks that would convey them to the gas chambers. 

Before writing his memoir, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination, published in 2013, Professor Kulka had approached his research on the Holocaust in an impersonal way. The memoir gave him a new way to address the subject. He saw it as an effort to bridge what he called “two modes of knowing — historical scholarship and analysis on one side, reflective memory and the work of the imagination on the other.”

The memoir was honored with the Geschwister-Scholl Prize in Germany and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Wingate Prize in Britain.