WARSAW — Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor who battled both the Nazis and the Communists, was given honorary Israeli citizenship for his work to save Jews during World War II and later surprised even himself by being instrumental in reconciling Poland and Germany, died here on Friday. He was 93.

“If someone told me, 60 years ago, when I was standing on the assembly square in Auschwitz, that I was going to be friends with Germans, citizens of a democratic and friendly nations, I would have said they were cuckoo crazy,” Mr. Bartoszewski said in a 2009 interview.

Mr. Bartoszewski died of a heart attack at a hospital near his home in Warsaw, government officials said, just five days after delivering an impassioned speech marking the anniversary of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Uprising, which he had witnessed and aided.

“He was one of the great cultural heroes both during and after the Second World War, from the struggles against tyranny through the process of renewing democratic systems,” said Shevach Weiss, a former Israeli ambassador to Poland. “His biography is our biography.”