Altman, Richard

Son of Hugo. Born in 1907 in Gleiwitz, Germany, he immigrated to Palestine in 1935. He worked in Haifa and served in the British army during World War II, joining the Operations Unit of the Engineers Corps. After the German invasion, the unit retreated south to the port of Kalamata in the Peloponnese, where the soldiers were captured by the Germans at the end of April 1941. The prisoners, including Richard, were first transferred to a temporary camp in Corinth, then to a temporary camp in Salonika, They were loaded onto freight trains under very difficult conditions, without food or drink, and with generous blows and beatings On arrival at the Wolfsberg camp in Austria, the Germans learned that the prisoners of the British army from Austria and Germany were sent immediately to Lamsdorf, near Breslau, where about 30 people, including Richard, went to a small labor camp in Trenowiec near the city of Gleiwitz. On the 4th of Adar 2, 5703 (March 11, 1943) they went out to work peeling strips of grass from slopes along the railroad tracks. When a train approached, they were warned to stay away from the tracks and wait for it to pass. When the train was alerted again, Richard jumped right to left and was instantly hit by the locomotive of a train coming from the opposite direction. After Richard’s death, an investigation team of the German civilian police arrived. The commander of the team, a German police officer, identified Richard who had studied with him in the school in their native town of Gleiwitz, near the site of the accident. Richard was buried in the cemetery in the town of Tarnowice. After the war, the British rounded up all the dead and buried them in the military cemetery in Krakow, Poland. His name was immortalized in the “Book of the Year” of the press in 1946 and in the book of volunteerism.