Auerbach, Yekutiel (Tilly)

Yekutiel, son of Yocheved and Yaakov-Shmuel Auerbach, was born in 1925 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1945. In 1945 he was transferred to Bergen-Belsen with other Jewish prisoners, and miraculously escaped death. He met up with his parents, who also miraculously survived the Holocaust and they began to prepare for immigration to Eretz Yisrael through France in 1945 in an “illegal” way. He enlisted in the army as a lieutenant colonel and served in the Jerusalem Brigade. On the 23rd of Adar I (March 4, 1948), his department set out to ambush Arab transport on the Jerusalem-Ramallah road. On the way back to Atarot, they were attacked by an Arab mob that surrounded them and most of the fighters were killed. Yekutiel was among the fallen and he was buried that day in Sanhedria cemetery. Two years later he was laid to rest at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.