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Source: http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/remembrance/2017/torchlighters.asp
Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2017
(Yad Vashem-The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority) Each year, six Holocaust survivors are chosen to light torches on Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, which began Sunday evening, in memory of the six million Jews who were murdered. These are the torchlighters: Elka Reines-Abramovitz was born in 1932 in Novoselitsa, northern Bessarabia, Romania (now Ukraine). On 7 July 1941 the Romanian Army entered Novoselitsa. "They shot people and burned houses," Elka recalled. "For the first time in my life I saw dead people, masses of bodies lying by the road. The images are seared into my mind." The town's Jewish inhabitants were deported to Transnistria. Within a year, only 70 out of 480 people remained alive. Moshe Ha-Elion was born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1925. After the start of the German occupation in April 1941, Moshe was deported to Auschwitz with his mother and his sister who were murdered there. He survived with the help of friends from Thessaloniki. He arrived in Israel in June 1946, was wounded during the War of Independence, and then served as a career soldier for 20 years. Moshe Jakubowitz was born in Warsaw in 1929. In April 1943, on the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he hid with his family in a bunker for seven days "until the Germans started burning down the ghetto. We had no choice. We came out with our hands up." Moshe was sent to Majdanek where his mother and two brothers were murdered. He then worked in a series of labor camps and concentration camp factories. During a death march towards Dachau, Moshe slipped away and linked up with American forces. After detention in Cyprus by the British, Moshe finally reached Israel in April 1948 and fought during the War of Independence. Moshe Porat was born in 1931 in Hungary. On 17 June 1944 the Jews of his town were deported in cattle cars to a brick factory in Debrecen, where he observed his bar mitzva. Days later, during another deportation, his train was bombed by the Allies and stopped on the tracks for many days. Many of the deportees died of suffocation, hunger and thirst. After surviving a labor camp and a death march to Mathausen, he was liberated by the U.S. Army on 5 May 1945. Max Privler was born in 1931 in Mikulichin in Poland (now Ukraine). In March 1942, Gestapo men and Ukrainian police broke into their home and arrested Max and his father, David. The next day, Max and David were brought to the forest with a group of Jews. A second before they were shot, David pushed Max into the killing pit, and was shot on top of him. One bullet lodged in Max's shoulder and remained there for 25 years. Max managed to climb out of the pit at night and fled to the home of Ukrainian friends, who hid him. One day, Max snuck into the ghetto with some food for his family and saw his mother fighting a Gestapo man, who was pulling her baby from her arms. He witnessed his mother being hanged and his baby brother murdered by the Germans. He later joined a group of partisans and then enlisted in the Red Army. He immigrated to Israel in 1990. Jeannine Sebbane-Bouhanna was born in 1929 in Nemours, Algeria. In 1938, the family immigrated to Paris. On 16 July 1942, the date of the roundup of the Jews of Paris, Jeannine and her family avoided arrest because they had French citizenship, but their close friends and neighbors were taken away. They hid Jews in their home and then helped smuggle them to the unoccupied zone in southern France. Jeannine and her three younger siblings were hidden by farmers in a village outside Paris, and in 1944 they fled to southern France, where they survived in a small village.