Markovitz, Jacob

Son of Sarah-Chaya and Zvi was born on February 8, 1922, in the town of Salomniki, Poland, to a family of six boys and girls who attended the elementary school in his hometown and then graduated from a vocational school there. He was a member of Betar. During the Nazi regime, in 1942, the parents, the twin daughters and the younger brother were taken by the Nazis to the death camps and all perished in the Holocaust; Yakov and his brother Meir were taken to a German labor camp and soon sent to Auschwitz. Jacob survived and only after several attempts did he succeed in boarding the ship “son of Hecht” in 1947, with another 600 immigrants on board. The ship was captured by the British and confiscated, and Jacob and his fellow passengers were transferred to the detention camps on Cyprus. On April 20, 1948, Yaakov arrived in Eretz Israel and joined the Irgun forces until the IDF was established and then joined the Alexandroni Brigade and participated in the “Policeman” operation, which was to open the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway, Where the transportation was impossible because it was blocked by the residents of the “Little Triangle”: the villages of Ein Ghazal, Yaje and Ighzim, and in late July 1948 our forces took control of the three villages with the help of artillery and mortars. And one of the shells landed on Yaakov’s class, who was critically wounded and died of his wounds in the hospital before his brother, who fought in the Negev, succeeded in reaching him alive. (30.7.1948) and was brought to rest at the military cemetery in Netanya in a letter of consolation received by his brother from the headquarters of the Alexandroni Brigade: “… you can be proud of such a brother who knew how to fight until the moment when Fell”.