Yosef, son of Kadia and Zvi, was born on January 17, 1927 in Poland, in the city of Kalisz in the district of Lodz. In his hometown he finished elementary school and started high school. In Poland, on the eve of World War II, there was a thriving Jewish community of about 3.5 million people. On September 1, 1939, the war broke out with the German invasion of Poland and its conquest in the lightning war (“Blitzkrieg”). Immediately thereafter, anti-Jewish decrees and regulations were issued that resulted in the social isolation of the Jews, their economic deprivation, and the undermining of all their systems of life. Approximately 15,000 Jews lived in Kalisz. Most of them fled with the outbreak of the war, and about twenty percent did not return. In October 1939, a month after the occupation of Poland, an organ was organized in the city of the Judenrat, and in November about 10,000 Jews were concentrated in the municipal market and from there were deported to the German administration. At the end of 1939, only 600 Jews who worked for the Germans remained in the Kalisch ghetto, and they too were deported shortly afterwards. Some of the Jews were exiled to Galicia. Later they were interned in ghettos and labor camps. By 1943 most of the ghettos and camps had been liquidated and the Jews were sent to the Belzec and Auschwitz death camps. By the end of the war almost all the Jews of Kalisz had been exterminated, some 90 percent of the Jews of Poland had been exterminated. Young Yosef was separated from his parents immediately after the German occupation. In the years to come, he was shunted from camp to camp, worked in poverty, suffering hunger and hardship, but survived. On May 5, 1945 he was liberated by the American army. A short time later, when Yosef realized that all his family had perished, he joined a group of pioneers. With the help of soldiers of the Jewish Brigade, they moved from Germany to training in Italy, and at the end of 1945 they made aliyah. The ship managed to escape from the British blockade and all its passengers were safely landed on the Herzliya coast. When he arrived Joseph joined Kibbutz Hulata in the Hula Valley. Soon he found his place in the metalwork shop, and even integrated into social life and ambitions. From the beginning of the War of Independence, Kibbutz Hulata was on the front line against the Syrian enemy, which, as expected, invaded the country immediately after the Declaration of Independence (May 14, 1948). Like all the friends, Yosef fulfilled his obligation to protect and protect. On the 5th of Iyar 5708 (June 5, 1948) Joseph went out with a group of soldiers to the south, with the intention of helping the Mishmar Hayarden colony which was under Syrian attack. In an olive grove near the settlement, a Syrian force opened fire on the force, Joseph was hit by an enemy shell and killed. Five days later, the Syrians succeeded in capturing Mishmar Hayarden, which was released a year later, in the cease-fire agreement. Joseph was twenty-one years old when he fell. He was laid to rest in the cemetery in Hulata. Joseph’s memory was included in a booklet published by the kibbutz in memory of his fallen soldiers. He wrote: “He has been in our midst for almost three years, he was always cheerful, full of life, believed in our good future, and in this war he felt himself a hero, a winner. His fate led him to the last battle, and we can not imagine that Yosef is gone, and he still faces us smiling or singing. This hero is a “last scion”. 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.
