Schwalb, Menachem-Yehuda (Mendo)

Son of-Shoshana and Eliezer was born on February 12, 1924, in the city of Oradea-Mare (Gross-Vardin), a city on the border between Romania and Hungary, which was once the center of tens of thousands of Jews. Traditional and general school in the elementary school and pre-gymnasium of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, and then they went to work in his shop, the boy loved music and nature, aspired to a life of freedom, and devoted all his time to tours and concerts. At the beginning of World War II, the city was returned to Hungary and when the Hungarians connected with the Nazis, he was imprisoned in the ghetto and then sent with his family to the concentration camps He escaped with his sister and sister-in-law to the Romanian territory, and returned to his hometown in 1945. When he learned that one of his sisters had survived and was in the Bergen-Belsen camp, The sister immigrated to Israel and the two brothers remained in Belgium.In the winter of 1948, when the War of Independence broke out in Israel, he felt compelled to feel the support of the Jewish state under attack. He wandered from office to office and after undergoing difficult training for a month and a half in France, was sent to Israel and arrived the day after the declaration of the State of Israel. After two days of vacation he joined the ranks of the enemy fighters and served in the Alexandroni Brigade. In his first letter to his brother, he wrote: “I did not regret having come to Israel, although my way is not a problem with roses. When he visited his sisters during the first truce, he parted from them in the hope that he would return safely. During Operation Danny, he was hit by an enemy shell and his two legs were immediately cut off and he died on the way to the hospital on 7 July 1948. He was laid to rest in the military cemetery in Netanya.