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Tamar's childhood was stolen from her in the ghetto.

Since then, she has dedicated her life to educating hundreds of children

Tamar Bodek's world was turned upside down when she was taken with her family to the concentration camp.

She survived with almost no food and while tragically losing her father.

At the end of the war she immigrated to Israel and fulfilled her dream - to become a teacher.

"Educating children is the purest, primary, direct," she defined.

She passed away last week at the age of 88

Eli Ashkenazi

30/06/2022

Thursday, 30 June 2022, 18:33 Updated: Saturday, 02 July 2022, 16:16

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Tamar examines deceased a week ago, at the age of 88 (Photo: courtesy of the family)

On the eve of her eighth birthday, Greta Tromer was promised that on a holiday she would receive a gift, a doll.

It was the pharmacist at the pharmacy where Greta's mother worked, Sophie, who promised her the coveted gift.

But before the festive day arrived, the girl's world was turned upside down, like the lives of the 50,000 Jews who lived in the city of Chernivtsi on the eve of the German invasion of it during World War II.

The girl Greta Trumer later became Tamar Budek, a well-known teacher in Haifa, who raised generations of children.

In her home, she nurtured a collection of dozens of dolls from different countries, a souvenir for her stolen childhood and a symbol of the life she rebuilt.

A week ago, an examiner passed away at the age of 88.

Tamar Budek was born in 1934 in Chernivtsi, then Romania.

After World War II, the city moved to the territory of the Ukrainian Republic within the territory of the Soviet Union.

The Jewish population then made up a third of the city's residents.

Her parents, Sophia and Marcel Trumer and her younger brother, Arie, lived in her grandparents' house, her mother's parents, the Koenig family.

The family was religious and spoke German at home.

The girl began studying at the Beit Yaakov Jewish school.

After World War II began, the Soviet Union took over Chernivtsi and deported many Jewish residents to Siberia.

In July 1941, after Nazi Germany began Operation Barbarossa, the Romanian army entered the city, doing the German thing, along with German army and police forces.

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Greta immigrated to Israel in 1948 and changed her name to Tamar (Photo: courtesy of the family)

The Jews of Chernivtsi were required to wear a yellow badge and were forbidden to leave their homes for most of the day.

In November 1941, all the city's Jews were transferred to the ghetto established in the city.

They were only allowed to take a small personal package with them to the ghetto.

The stay in the ghetto was short, from which they were deported to a concentration camp.

Tamar remembered the ride in crowded train cars.

"Dad told us we were going to a good place, where there would be a house and food and a better life," she said.

The train stopped in the city of Markolesht and about two weeks later began to lead them on foot in the heavy cold, until they reached a camp in the city of Mogilev Podolsky.

The Romanians deported tens of thousands of Jews there who were concentrated in appalling conditions.

Tamar described how they were ushered into a large hall full of people and faces crying, noise and terrible overcrowding.

She told her family that her father was immediately sent to forced labor.

Every time he returned from work, he was wounded and bruised.

One day he returned beaten and with severe bruises, and passed away after a few days.

Tamar remembered that day;

He lay on a high bunk, covered with a white sheet and was not allowed to approach him, crying and shouting.

The mother and her two children then moved to another area in Mogilev and continued to live in harsh conditions, starving and prone to disease.

Luckily they survived some deportations to camps where conditions were even more difficult.

During the day the mother would go out to look for work and gather leftover food, while her two children were left alone in a small alcove, suffering from a cold and often getting sick.

The main food that came to their mouths for nearly three years was kernels and potato peels.

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"Takes pure souls and directs them."

Tamar examines her work as a teacher (Photo: courtesy of the family)

In the spring of 1944, the Red Army entered the city and liberated it.

The children and their mother were finally free, but without their father.

Tamar remembered how that day they ran after the tanks, the Soviet soldiers handed out candies to them and the joy was great.

"We felt like the Messiah had come, we hugged their boots," she said of the day.

Greta, her brother and their mother left the camp exhausted and ill, returned to Chernivtsi and from there to an orphanage in Bucharest.

Greta and her brother were later sent to the Apeldoorn youth aliyah camp in the Netherlands, where they learned Hebrew.

In October 1948, the brothers boarded the State of Israel on the Negba ship, which had about 500 children and teenagers who survived the Holocaust.

14-year-old Greta was sent to Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim as part of the "Aliyat Hanoar" and decided to change her name to an Israeli name, Tamar.

At the age of 17, she left the kibbutz to fulfill her dream of becoming a kindergarten teacher.

She was registered as a student in the first class of the college that had just been established near Kiryat Tivon and was then called "Kibbutz Oranim Seminar" - now "Oranim - the Academic College of Education".

Tamar and Moshe Bodek had three children and 15 grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren (Photo: courtesy of the family)

Then she also met Moshe Bodek, a Haifa-based Irgun member of the War of Independence who fought in the Givati ​​Brigade. For decades he worked as a teacher in schools in Haifa.

After graduating, she began working as a kindergarten teacher in the Neve Amal transit camp and later moved to Gan Tamar in the village of Ata. To Haifa, where Tamar worked as a kindergarten teacher for decades. When she worked at the Eldar kindergarten near the Mashen nursing home in Haifa, she used to go there with the kindergarten children during the holidays and make the residents happy there

. She was forced to stop working as a kindergarten teacher and began working with children individually and in small groups as a kindergarten teacher in Tirat Carmel.

Thus, the woman whose childhood was stolen from her and who struggled for her survival instead of rejoicing with her parents and brother, playing, sleeping in a warm bed and studying in class with her peers, has over the years become a figure who influences hundreds of children and benefits with them.

"Educating children was my vocation in life," she said several years ago in an interview with Jordan Whitner from IDF Gali, to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day. "Educating children is the purest, primary, direct," she continued. According to what you believe in.

I believe in love. "On the last day of Independence, Moshe Bedek passed away. 45 days later, Tamar passed away.

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