Piwek, Hanoch

Son of Tzilla and Avraham. He was born on May 15, 1922 in Leipzig, Germany. In 1939 he immigrated to Eretz Israel with Aliyat Hanoar and underwent agricultural training in Merhavia. At the end of the training period, he decided to continue his work in the field and joined most of his comrades in training for the Hahoresh organization. He moved to Kibbutz Hutshtok and served as a paratrooper. Among his friends he was known as a righteous man with will and perseverance, and thanks to these qualities he also managed to overcome the obstacles that piled up in his life. In 1942, he joined the British army and was sent to serve in the Transport Corps, where he was assigned to the water transport unit in Benghazi and when the Jewish Brigade wanted to move to it, and after much effort he was given this task and transferred to the 178 transport company in the brigade. The soldiers greeted Holocaust refugees and assisted them in everything they needed, where he served in Germany, the country from which he had fled before World War II. On 29 Tamuz, July 10, 1945, near the city of Ulm in Germany, Hanoch drove to the concentration camp in Dachau in order to transfer Jewish survivors to the immigrants’ camp established by the Italian Brigade. He slipped off a car, fell into a deep abyss, was badly wounded, and on the way to the hospital died of his wounds. He was buried in Odina, Italy. His name was immortalized in “The Brigade Book” and in the book “Beshalach and the Plow.”