Lutz, Joseph

Son of Batya and Dov. Born in 1905 in Fransk, Poland as an only son in a family of five, his father was murdered by the Cossacks during the First World War and since then Joseph bore the burden of supporting the family. He immigrated to Palestine in 1936 and joined the Kibbutz Givat Hashlosha where he worked as a painter. At the outbreak of World War II, he volunteered for the British army, fought in Greece, and fought in the difficult battles of Tobruk in the Western Desert. With the transport company 462, on 27 Nisan, 1.5.1943, he was on board the ship “Aryanpura” on its way from Alexandria, Egypt to Malta, in a convoy of British ships carrying military personnel to invade Sicily. On that day the ship was bombed by German planes and one hundred and forty of the Jewish unit’s soldiers drowned in the sea with their ship, and Joseph among them. He left two sisters. The rest of his family perished in the Holocaust. In the military cemetery on Mount Herzl a ship-shaped monument was erected in memory of those who were missing, and next to it is a water pool with the names of the 140 fallen. This fallen hero is a “maklan” – a hero whose burial place is unknown.