Mr. Yoran and his brother became full-time fighters, killing German soldiers on patrols or at their camps, planting mines, destroying roads and bridges — all while scrounging and stealing food and clothing. They soon made their way through northeast Poland, to the forests near Lake Naroch in what is now Belarus, to join a group of Jewish partisans who were coordinating their missions with Soviet forces.

Yet even there, fighting alongside non-Jewish Russians and Poles, they encountered anti-Semitism.

“So here we were, fighting against a common enemy — the Germans, whose aim it was to totally annihilate the Jewish people and to take over the Soviet Union — side by side with fellow fighters whose own hatred of Jews was notorious,” Mr. Yoran wrote.

“In this demoralizing situation I told myself again and again that I was fighting as a Jew — with them, but not as one of them. I dreamed of having my own country, of fighting for it, and even dying for it. That was what kept up my morale.”

He and his brother joined the Polish Army, advancing into Germany in 1945 as Allied forces closed in on Berlin.

Mr. Yoran was born Selim Sznycer on June 29, 1925, in Warsaw, the son of a lumberyard owner. He had only limited schooling before his family fled the Nazis.

After the war he worked for a group that helped smuggle Jewish refugees into British-controlled Palestine, resisting British efforts to prevent them from entering.

He assumed many identities on his own journey there, including that of a British soldier. Finally, to convince the authorities that he was not a refugee but a lifelong resident of Palestine, he assumed the name of a dead cousin, Shalom Yoran, in 1946.