Keller, Moshe-Kurt

Son of Martha and Willie. He was born in 1912 in Berlin, Germany. He belonged to the Blau-Weiss youth movement and after graduating from high school in Berlin he worked in a vocational school. In 1936 he immigrated to Eretz Israel and settled in Haifa. In 1938 he enlisted in the Nautrim Brigade and served as a guard in Zichron Yaakov. During the Second World War, he enlisted in the British Army and was assigned to the 606 Company of the Israel Defense Forces. He served in Egypt and the western desert – in Marsa Marutah and Tobruk – and in March 1941 he was sent to Greece with the force that was intended to stop the German invasion of this country. About a month and a half later, after the collapse of the British alignment in Greece, Moshe fled with his unit from Kalamata Beach to Crete. During the German-British campaign on the island he was captured by the Germans and sent to a POW camp in Germany. He spent four years in captivity and eventually took part in the “death parade” of the prisoners into Germany. On 29 Sivan, April 12, 1945, the convoy was bombed and Moshe was hit and killed. He was laid to rest in the Dornberg cemetery in Bad Tolz, Germany. He left parents and two brothers. His memory was immortalized in “The Book of Volunteerism,” in the book “Yizkor” by the Jabotinsky Institute and in the “Book of the Year of the Journalists”, 1956.