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Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day: Torchlighters 2011

(Yad Vashem) Simcha Applebaum was born in 1927 in what is today Belarus. In 1943, Simcha and his family were sent to Birkenau where his relatives were all murdered. After liberation, Simcha came to Eretz Israel in 1946 and fought in the War of Independence. In 1948, together with other survivors, he helped establish Kibbutz Netzer Sereni. Simcha fought in all of Israel's wars up to the Yom Kippur War, reaching the rank of colonel. Avraham Aviel was born in 1929 in what is today Belarus. On 10 May 1942, Avraham, his mother, and his brothers were taken to a death pit near the cemetery in Radun where most of them were shot to death. Avraham managed to escape. He joined the Jewish partisans in the Nacza Grodno Forest and fought alongside them until the area was liberated in July 1944. Avraham fought in the War of Independence, in the battles along the road to Jerusalem. He later settled in Tel Aviv, where he established the Beit Alim publishing house. Dina Buchler-Chen was born in 1940 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (today Croatia). Her father was murdered in the Jasenovac concentration camp, along with her grandfather and aunts. Dina, her mother and grandmother ended up at the Loborgrad camp adjacent to Zagreb. By the end of 1941 Dina was very sick and malnourished, and one of the camp guards helped smuggle her out of the camp. Her mother attached a note to the baby's neck with her name, date of birth, and the names of two relatives to whom she should be given. The guard left the "package" at the Jewish Community Center in Zagreb. She survived in the care of a Christian family, was retrieved after the war by her mother's cousin, and in 1948 they emigrated to Israel. In 1994, the family that cared for her was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. Andrei Calarasu, formerly Bernard Grupper, was born in 1922 in Romania. On 29 June 1941, with the German invasion of Russia, Bernard, his father and his brother were marched to the train station where German and Romanian soldiers pulled gold teeth from their mouths, and cut off fingers bearing gold rings. The men were placed into a closed railroad car with 120 others for an eight-day journey to Calarasu. In 1965, Andrei immigrated to Israel where he was a member of the founding team of Israel Television. Yona (Janek) Fuchs was born in Lwow (today Ukraine) in 1925. Because of his "Aryan" features, his parents encouraged Yona to escape from the ghetto. His father obtained a forged birth certificate for him and sent him to stay with a non-Jewish friend in a nearby village. While Yona was living there, all of its Jewish residents were shot to death. He was taken to the Lwow-Janowska concentration camp, but dug underneath the fence and escaped. He eventually reached Romania and in 1944 emigrated to Israel, where he fought in Israel's wars. Chava Pressburger was born in 1930 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She was deported to the ghetto in Terezin in May 1944. In September 1944, her older brother, Petr, was deported to Auschwitz and murdered. In May 1945, the Red Army liberated the ghetto. In 1949, Chava immigrated to Israel where she created and taught art: in 1993, she received the prestigious Sussman Prize for her Holocaust-related artwork. Her journal of life in the ghetto was later published in Salvaged Pages(Yale University Press, 2002).
2011-04-29 00:00:00
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