Kramer, Joshua

Son of-Batya and Baruch, was born in 1928 in Molodocheno, Poland. He studied in the “cheder” and in elementary school. When the Nazis invaded Poland his father was murdered and Yehoshua fled with his mother and his baby sister to the forest. Where his mother had died. With the entry of the Red Army in 1944, he left the forest, gave his sister to a Russian children’s home and was himself accepted to a vocational school in Ural. In 1946, he returned to Poland, and in Lodz he joined a youth group of Hashomer Hatzair. He moved with the kibbutz members to Silesia, and from there they set out on the Bericha route through the Czech Republic, Vienna and Salfelden. They crossed the Italian border They came to Abiliana near Torino. Where they entered a youth institution where they learned and trained themselves in the work with ORT. At the institution, the group formed a training nucleus called “Liberation”. Yehoshua played key positions in the nucleus, as a member of the secretariat, a work organizer, a youth group counselor, etc. In preparation for the aliyah to Israel, the nucleus merged with the “Bamavak” group to a single organization called “Bamahat”. In January 1948, their group boarded the small illegal immigrant ship “35 Heroes of Gush Etzion”, and after 16 days of rocking the sea, the ship was seized by the British Navy near Haifa and its immigrants were sent to Cyprus. And Yehoshua served as the secretary of the group and as a teacher in one of the classes, during which he immigrated to Israel on April 29, 1948 and was sent as a training nucleus for Sha’ar HaGolan, and immediately saw his sister who had been brought to Eretz Israel in the Youth Aliyah, but she did not know him. Shortly after returning to Sha’ar Hagolan from the meeting with his sister, during the bitter battle for the Jordan Valley, his nucleus was sent to send two men as reinforcements to the infantry fighters The Syrians invaded the Jordan Valley on May 16, 1948, took control of several outposts in the area, but were stopped by our forces in Zemach, and on May 18 the Syrians launched an attack on a plant with the help of artillery and tanks. At first the town of Zemach fell, and finally the police station and the defenders retreated under the Syrian fire towards Degania, which fell on the 9th of Iyar 5708 (18.5.1948). Joshua died for the defense of the land he lived in for a little over two weeks. He was laid to rest at the military cemetery in Degania Aleph.