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Torchlighters on Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2023

(Yad Vashem) Robert (Reuven) Bonfil was born in 1937 in Karditsa, in the Thessaly region of Greece. Robert and his mother hid in a coal bunker under the house. Later Robert and his parents hid in the home of a Greek Orthodox family in Apidea. When German troops approached the village, they hid in a cabin in the mountains. Robert immigrated with his family to Israel in 1968. He is Professor Emeritus of Medieval and Renaissance Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Efim Gimelshtein was born in 1935 in Minsk in the Soviet Union (Belarus). A month after the German occupation, Efim and his family were imprisoned in the Minsk ghetto. His mother's brother-in-law, Pinchas Dobin, and his sons dug a hiding place under their house next to the Jewish cemetery in the ghetto. In October 1943, when the Germans began to liquidate the Minsk ghetto, 26 people entered the bunker, including Efim, where they sat in almost complete darkness for nine months, suffering from thirst, hunger, weakness and disease. On July 3, 1944, after Minsk was liberated and the group was discovered by Soviet soldiers, only 13 had survived. Tova Gutstein was born in Warsaw in 1933. After the establishment of the ghetto in October 1940, Tova would go out of the ghetto through the sewers and beg for food from local Poles or collect produce from the fields. She was outside the ghetto when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out. She reached the forest and was taken in by partisans. One day, the partisans did not return and Tova was left alone in the forest until the end of the war. Ben-Zion Raisch was born in 1932 in Cernauti, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). In July 1941, the Romanians and the Germans occupied Cernauti and the Jews were confined in a ghetto. He would crawl under the ghetto fences and collect sugar beets that would fall from freight wagons in order to survive. Using knitting needles he made from a barbed-wire fence, he and his mother knitted socks, gloves and sweaters for the villagers in exchange for potatoes. Malka Rendel was born in 1927 in Nagyecsed, Hungary. In 1944, Malka and her family were deported to Auschwitz in a cattle car, where most of the family did not survive the selection. Months later, as the Red Army approached, Malka and two sisters were forced on a death march to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. They were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where her sisters died. They were thrown through the window onto a pile of corpses. "That memory still haunts me," Malka says. Judith Sohlberg was born in Amsterdam in 1935. In September 1943, Judith and her family were deported to the Westerbork transit camp. Every Tuesday, deportations left for the east and the family was sent to Bergen-Belsen. In April 1945, the family members were put on a train that traveled without a destination and many of the prisoners died on the train before the Red Army arrived.
2023-04-17 00:00:00
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