examined them, gave them bread and let them sleep in a school hall. From Turkey the family crossed to Syria, where they met members of the Haganah, and decided to immigrate to Israel. In 1944, the family boarded a train, reaching Israel via Lebanon.
Avraham settled in Tel Aviv. On reaching adulthood, he worked as a marketing and sales director, and today is the administrator of a marketing services company.
Avraham is married to Yaffa, and they have two children and five grandchildren.
Ruth Bondy was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1923. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, she was forced to work in agricultural labor. Later she was interned in the Terezin ghetto, and in 1943 she was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she looked after young children who were later sent to their deaths. In July 1944 she was transferred to a number of different labor camps in the Hamburg district. With her liberation in the spring of 1945 at Bergen-Belsen, Ruth weighed just 35 kilograms (77 pounds), and was sick with typhus. He parents had died during the Shoah.
After liberation, Ruth returned to Prague. With the establishment of the State of Israel, she joined “Gahal” (Recruitment in the Diaspora) and immigrated to Israel. “On 31 December 1948, in the afternoon, a low mountain range came in to view on the horizon, behind which I expected to see the Carmel Mountains. Only when we entered Haifa port did I realize that it was Mount Carmel itself, and that the State of Israel would actually be very different from the Land of Israel I envisioned in the Diaspora…. On the way to the Sarafand Base the driver stopped, after hearing our cries of amazement, next to the orchard, and allowed us to gather the fruits that had been left behind: golden oranges rolling on the ground and nobody had bothered to pick them up! All of us, future IDF soldiers, filled our pockets with oranges, and on the bus we peeled them, inhaled their scent and ate them very slowly: they had the taste of the yearned-for Land of Israel, as I had imagined it during the years of darkness” (Shvarim Shlemim – “Whole Fractures”, p.89).
Israela Hargil (Harnik) was born in Brody, Poland, in 1938. Her parents were teachers and musicians: her mother played the piano, and her father played the violin and taught in an elementary school. Brody was occupied by the Germans on 1 July 1941. On 15 July, some 250 Jewish scholars, including Israela’s mother, were summoned by the Gestapo to the town square. There they were tortured for two days, and then murdered. Their bodies were thrown into pits next to the Jewish cemetery.
On 1 January 1943, the 6,000 Jews of Brody were concentrated in a ghetto. Israela fled the ghetto and hid in the home of a family friend, Jacenty Miklaszewski, his wife Maria and their daughter, Wladyslawa. They changed her name to Eva Miklaszewska. “I called them ‘Uncle’ and ‘Aunt,’” relates Israela. “I had a cover story: I was a family member who had come to them after my parents were killed in the bombings.”
On the eve of her journey to Krakow with the Miklaszewskis Israela visited her father, who was hiding in a bunker in a nearby village. When she parted from him, she was forbidden from telling him that they were leaving Brody. In Krakow, she lived with the Miklaszewskis. She was sent to a nursery school run by nuns, and walked about using the false identity of a Christian girl. On 19 January 1945 Krakow was liberated by the Red Army.
Israela’s father fled the bunker and joined the Red Army. Following the war, some four years after they were separated, he found his daughter.
“In February 1945 I left the Miklaszewskis. I parted from my local Catholic priest in Krakow. He did not know I was Jewish, and drew me a sketch in pencil in my journal of the head of Jesus with a crown of thorns and drops of blood. As a dedication he wrote: ‘To my outstanding pupil, Ewunia (Ewa), with affection.’ When he parted from me he said: ‘You can always turn to Jesus. He will always help you.’ At that time, I was already a member of the Zionist youth movement, ‘Gor