Constantino, Raphael (Reno)

Raphael, son of Liza and Elchanan. He was born on July 12, 1927 in Korpo, Greece. He grew up in his hometown. On the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, some 75,000 Jews lived in Greece, 1,800 of them in Corfu. The Jews of Corfu had Italian or Greek citizenship. Was not occupied by the Germans in the spring of 1941 and was divided into three zones of occupation – the Italian, the German and the Bulgarian. Corfu was ruled by the Italians, and at that time the Jews continued their lives almost as usual. After Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, the Germans took control of Corfu and immediately began to abuse Jews. The Aktion of deportation from Korpo took place at the beginning of June 1944. The Jews were arrested by German military police units and assembled in the ancient fort in the city, after a seven-day arduous journey to Athens and from there to Auschwitz. By the end of the war, some 65,000 Greek Jews had been murdered, including almost all the Jews of Corfu. Raphael’s family was annihilated entirely in Auschwitz, only he survived when the Red Army was liberated. After his release, he lived for a while in his uncle’s home in the city of Znata, and six months later his uncle sent him to Eretz Israel. In 1945 Raphael immigrated to Israel, and although the British seized the illegal immigrant ship he was traveling in, he managed to avoid them and reached Kibbutz Ein Harod. A few months later, when he did not get along on the kibbutz, he moved to Tel Aviv, where he worked as a porter and in various work of suffering. With the outbreak of the War of Independence, Rafael was one of the first to enlist. For about six months he was among the escorts of the convoys to Jerusalem and even moved to the city. In one of the battles in Jerusalem, Raphael was injured in the right eye, transferred to a hospital, and underwent an artificial eye. Since the operation, Rafael had been in constant pain, and from time to time he needed treatment. In March 1949, he was transferred to the hospital in Haifa, but while he waited for surgery on the 5th of Adar 5709 (March 6, 1949), Raphael was twenty-two years old and was brought to eternal rest in the military cemetery in Haifa. The survivors of the Holocaust are survivors of the Holocaust who survived the last remnant of their nuclear family (parents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters) who experienced the Holocaust in the ghettos and / or concentration camps and / or in hiding and hiding in territories occupied by the Nazis and / Or in combat alongside members of the underground movements or partisans in the Nazi-occupied territories who immigrated to Israel during or after World War II, wore uniforms and fell in the Israeli army.