Maimon, Pesach

Son of Leah and Nathan Woodowski. He was born in 1906 in the town of Zelichow in the Lublin district of Poland, to a traditional family, and at a young age he helped work in the orchard of fruit trees, the vegetable garden, and his parents’ barn. In 1931 he went to the Zionist pioneering training center in Zegninsk, and in 1934 he immigrated to Eretz Israel and joined the Gordonia G group on the Kibbutz Degania B. He also worked in all branches of the agriculture and spent his free time working in woodworking. The children were fond of him, telling them stories until late at night, playing with them in various games and traveling with them in the fields of the farm, and they, for their part, loved him and asked for his closeness. At the outbreak of the bloody events of 1936 he was one of the first recruits to the corps. After the outbreak of World War II, he enlisted in the British army and was assigned to the Hebrew Transport Unit. 462. In the unit, which was part of the eighth camp of the British army, Pessach and his friends served in El-Almin and reached the borders of Tunis. The British army headquarters planned to invade Sicily in the middle of 1943 and set up this unit. Its members were transferred to Egypt, equipped with modern equipment and loaded onto a ship that was to be transferred to Malta, where the invasion force left. The ship sailed from the port of Alexandria and after a day of sailing joined a convoy of thirty vessels, tankers, cargo ships, escort ships and minesweepers. On the afternoon of 27 Nisan, 1.5.1943, a German reconnaissance plane passed over the convoy of ships and disappeared. In the early evening a group of German bombers arrived and bombed the convoy. The ship “Arinfora” on board the soldiers of Unit 462 suffered a direct hit and went down to the depths, taking 140 soldiers from the unit, Pesach among them. He left a sister. Kibbutz Degania B issued a pamphlet in his memory. In the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, a ship-shaped memorial was erected in memory of the missing, and next to it is a water pool with the names of the fallen engraved on the bottom. This fallen hero is a “maklan” – a hero whose burial place is unknown.