Petrus, Joseph (Cossack)

Josef, the son of Pasha and Mordechai, was born on 17 May 1928 in Poland, in the city of Przemysl in the Lodz District. Born to a well-known family in the city. On the eve of World War II, the Jewish community in Przemysl numbered 19,400 people. There were diverse political activities in which religious, cultural and welfare institutions operated. The city was occupied by the Germans on 14 September 1939, and immediately began serious persecution against the Jews and hundreds were murdered. The city was later transferred to the Soviet control, which expelled some 7,000 Jews from the Soviet Union. The Germans took control of Przemysl again in June 1941. In July of that year a Judenrat was set up, and some 1,000 Jews were transferred to forced labor camps. In June 1942, about one thousand young men were sent to the Janowska labor camp in Lvov. In mid-July 1942, 22,000 Jews from the city and its surroundings were concentrated in a ghetto. About 10,000 of them were deported to the Belzec death camp, the rest of whom lived in two parts of the ghetto. Some organized and engaged in attempted uprising, others contacted the partisans in the forests. Gradually, all the Jews of Przemysl were deported to extermination camps until the final liquidation of the ghetto in September 1943. Joseph remained alone in the family. His parents, brother and grandmother were exterminated, and his uncles were exiled to Siberia. During the occupation he pretended to be Christian and lived in Poland and Hungary in the name of the borrowed “Kazik”. His Lev was aware of the hardships of his Jewish brothers, and he often endangered himself with help. Finally, the Germans’ suspicion was aroused, and in Hungary he was arrested. He was severely tortured and sent to Auschwitz, but managed to hold on. With the beginning of the Soviet army’s offensive in the direction of Krakow and Auschwitz, in mid-January 1945, the Nazis began a hasty retreat. The 66,000 prisoners, most of them Jews, were marched in long columns on a grueling trek through the bitter cold, in the so-called “death march”. About 15,000 of them collapsed from exhaustion or were shot by the Germans. The rest were brought to concentration camps throughout the Reich. Joseph was put on one of the trains that made their way to Germany, and as long as he jumped from the train. He found refuge in the Czech Republic, where he stayed until the final liquidation of the Nazis. At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, France, and joined a group of orphans who had gathered in the framework of the Youth Aliya. With endless devotion he would give them Hebrew lessons and lecture them all the information he had acquired during his turbulent years. His relatives tried to influence him to emigrate to America, but he rejected the offer and insisted that he would only restore his life in the Land of Israel. In the summer of 1945, after the expectation of receiving the desired certificates was canceled, Youth Aliyah decided to raise the group of children in an illegal way. Joseph and his friends boarded an illegal immigrant ship, but when they approached the shores of the country they were caught by the British and all the immigrants were sent to the Atlit detention camp. The Atlit camp, near the settlement of Atlit on the Carmel coast, was established by the British in the late 1930s to imprison Jews who arrived in Israel without an immigration permit or were suspected of underground activity. Hundreds of Ma’apilim were imprisoned there, and in certain periods even thousands. At the beginning of the period of organized rebellion in British rule, and as part of its struggle against immigration restrictions, the Haganah decided to launch a daring operation to free the detainees from Atlit. On the night of October 10, 1945, the Palmach fighters broke through the camp’s fences and about two hundred of its inmates escaped from it. The British police were alerted to the place, but the immigrants managed to outwit them, aided by thousands of Haifa Jews who helped block the British policemen. After an arduous night journey, accompanied by Palmach fighters, the immigrants reached Carmel through the kibbutzim Yagur and Beit Oren.And the Jewish Sea in Israel. Yosef was among the escapees from Atlit that night. He came to Kibbutz Dafna, where he devoted himself to Hebrew studies – he learned the dictionary of Gur (Yehuda Gurzovsky) literally by Lev. A few weeks later he began sending letters to his relatives in Sabra Hebrew, spiced with colorful expressions. But his life on the kibbutz did not satisfy him, and it was there that his loneliness grew. Yosef, who wanted to forget the period of the struggle, did not like to be called “Kazik” and would say, “In Israel I start my life anew.” He worked on his studies at every free moment and prepared for the matriculation exams, out of a desire to be admitted to higher education at the Technion. During this period a revolution took place in his soul, without any outside influence. Although he came from a family of Hassidim and Torah scholars, he was not very devout in his childhood, and here he suddenly felt the need to move to a religious environment, to return to his land and to observe mitzvot like his forefathers. After he decided to change his living environment and his way of life, he could no longer be prevented from doing so. With the help of Youth Aliyah, he moved to the agricultural school in Mikvah Israel, where he was absorbed into the religious sector. The boy, whose conditions of life did not allow him to attend an orderly school, sought to fill everything he had missed during the Nazi inferno, invested all his energies and energy in Torah and Jewish studies, and was truly “persistent.” Until midnight-and sometimes even later, when the last of the late ones had already gone to sleep and all the lights had long since gone-there was still light from his tent. He used to be alone there with the subjects of study, and sometimes he would impose a regime of silence on himself. During these hours he pondered questions about the nature of the world and pondered on the issues he was concerned with day and night: the problems of religion and nature, science and faith. In a short time he acquired thorough and profound information in Hebrew, and they distinguished him from others. Everyone knew Joseph and appreciated him despite his seclusion and despite his different character. Out of a genuine desire to integrate, he was inclined to study as well as at work and contributed his part. Joseph loved the land, loved the animal and showed great interest and talent in the technical field. He was involved in various attempts at activities for the benefit of both agriculture and technique. Joseph was deeply nationalized, and when the War of Independence broke out he was among the first to report. He was assigned to the “Etzioni” Brigade, the “Jerusalem” Brigade (the 6th Brigade of the Hagana), and was one of the elite units of the Brigade, together with his comrades, from Jerusalem to reinforce the besieged Gush Etzion. The religious company to which he belonged arrived in Gush Katif in January 1948, shortly after the fall of 35 fighters who tried to get there. Joseph described his experiences in besieged Gush Etzion in a letter that spread over dozens of pages. With great sincerity he tells of the moments of difficulty and crisis with the commanders, the differences between the various recruits, and documents life in the atmosphere of uncertainty, while the only external connection with the rest of the country is through planes that dropped into a mass of supplies, equipment and ammunition. A piece of his letter from the Yellow Hill: “… It is already Wednesday that heavy rains are falling with strong winds, and a thick fog covers everything, so that you do not see a person a few meters away. We do not have newspapers this week, and because of the rain we do not get off the hill to eat, we do not hear the radio and we do not know what’s happening in the world … The mail does not come here in such weather and does not leave here. “During his stay in Gush Etzion, “I quickly learned the profession,” he said. “I became very friendly with the commander and the instructor, and he trusted me and placed me in responsible positions. an island”. In another letter, he describes the”Exactly a week ago, when I toured a minefield near Ein Zurim that I had left alone a week earlier, one of them exploded two meters away from me, and I was wounded in both legs by shrapnel, and on my right foot is a small thing, almost nothing, “I lost a little blood, but it did not hurt me, because there was too much anyway …” After he was wounded in the leg, he lay wounded in the hospital in the block and wrote: “Now I have a large piece of shrapnel in the middle between my ankle and the knee. A pretty serious impression that my days are numbered … “But Joseph did not succumb to pain, and soon returned to combat. On May 12, 1948, soldiers of the Jordanian Legion launched a powerful attack on the Gush Etzion outposts and managed to locate them in two. Armed with armored vehicles and artillery, accompanied by a large Arab local force from nearby villages, occupied several outposts around Kfar Etzion. On the following day, on May 13, 1948, a Jordanian armored force burst into Kfar Etzion, followed by a crowd of Arabs from the surrounding villages, and with intense shelling conquered the village, and during the last battle Yosef held important liaison duties on behalf of the village commander, Death: At the age of twenty, he was about to fall, and about 130 defenders were killed on the same day in Kfar Etzion, some of them murdered after their surrender.Two day after the declaration of the State of Israel, the defenders of the other three Gush Etzion settlements , Masuot Yitzhak and Ein Zurim. On this day the bloc was completely destroyed and ceased to exist. His last defenders were captured by the Jordanian. The bodies of the fallen remained where they had fallen for a year or more. Their remains were collected in 1949 by a special operation of the military rabbinate. Joseph was brought to eternal rest, together with the rest of the Gush Etzion Bloc, in a large mass grave on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, at a state ceremony held on the 17th of Cheshvan 5710 (November 17, 1949). 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.