Pollack, Shmuel (Shilo)

Shmuel, the son of Chaya Rivka and Jacob, was born on November 17, 1929 in Romania, in the city of Vishiol in Transylvania. He attended an elementary school in his city. On the eve of World War II, more than 600,000 Jews lived in Romania, more than a third of them in Transylvania. Romania cooperated with Nazi Germany, and nearly half of the country’s Jews were murdered during the war. Many of the victims were residents of northern Transylvania, an area which, in 1940, Hitler gave to Hungary as a gift for cooperation with him. Shmuel’s parents were murdered in Auschwitz, apparently in 1943. He himself survived after being adopted by his uncles, Adelaide and Mano Polak, and lived in their home until the end of the war. Immediately after the war, Shmuel sought to reach the Land of Israel. He boarded the ship in 1946 but was captured by the British and sent to the Cyprus refugee camp, where he spent a year and a half. On January 15, 1948, Shmuel managed to reach Eretz Israel and settled in Zichron Ya’akov. The War of Independence was already in full swing and he joined the 24th Battalion of the “Carmeli” Brigade – the No. 2 Brigade in the Haganah. Since then he has participated in many battles, especially in the Galilee. In October 1948 Shmuel fought in the “Yael” operation in the Sheikh Abed area. Sheikh Abed (today the IDF outpost on the Lebanese border) was the name of a high peak in the Naftali Mountains, which controlled nearby Kibbutz Manara, on the Hula Valley and on the roads to and from Lebanon. Kaukji’s “Salvation Army.” The fighters of the Carmeli Brigade fought heavy battles on the 22nd and the 23rd of October 1948, but did not succeed in conquering Sheikh Abed. Only a week later, during Operation Hiram, the place was conquered and the entire Galilee was liberated, and in the battle of Sheik Abd, on the 22nd of Tishrei, 5709 (22.10.1948), Shmuel fell, He was killed in an ambush at the military cemetery in Rosh Pina, and was the last survivor of the Holocaust. Parents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters), who personally experienced the Holocaust in the ghettos and / or concentration and extermination camps and / or in flight and hiding in territories occupied by the Nazis and / or fighting alongside members of the underground movements or partisans in the Nazi occupied territories, World War II or later, wore uniforms and fell in the Israeli army.