74 years after he was killed in the War of Independence - the abandoned child who survived the Holocaust is being commemorated - voila! news

On June 10, 1948 Private Haim-Harry Wolf was killed in an incident involving the infiltration of Syrian soldiers into the Golan Gate Kibbutz.

He was twenty years old in Naples.

Only four years before, a lonely boy, without any relatives, had arrived in Israel.

From the age of three he grew up without parents, a child who was abandoned time and time again, without the touch of warmth and love.

A moment after he was accepted and educated in a youth boarding school in the Land of Israel, he began to feel solid ground under his feet and build his life from scratch, he fell in battle.

He had three friends, from periods of wandering in Europe during the Holocaust.

Only they remembered the lonely boy and visited his grave.

Only now, after 74 years, a Wolf winner whose name will rise from the abyss of oblivion, be remembered and immortalized.

Last week his picture was hung in the commemoration room for the martyrs of Israel's systems in Kibbutz Shaar Golan.

Fragments of his life story began to be collected and put together into a continuous, even if sparse, life story.

A group of thirty people sat and listened and brought up the memory of the soldier who was the last scion of his family and to this day there was no one to remember and commemorate him.

Haim-Harry Wolf (photo: official website, organization "Let Face to Names")

Wolf's commemoration is an initiative of attorney Israel Zar-Aviv, "I love a man whose ear is tuned to other people's stories," he defined himself. Several years ago, Zar-Aviv was exposed to the life story of Zvi Lamdan, a young man who survived the horrors of the Holocaust and decided to write about him. A book called "The Boy Who Didn't Forget His Name". When he was working on writing the book, he heard from Lamdan that his journey of survival in his childhood and youth was shared by three other Jewish children of his age. One of them was Wolf, who also came with Lamdan and another friend to Eretz Israel.

Zer-Aviv ran To know more about that friend of Lamdan and asked to find information about him, beyond the date of his fall in the battles of the War of Independence. "When I realized that he was a fighter in Golani's 12th battalion, the 'Barak' battalion, I also felt a special connection.

Years after him, I was also a soldier in the same battalion," said Zer-Aviv. "I felt that an emotional connection was created here and I asked to learn more about him," he added.

The news about the fall of Wolff, a newspaper from July 6, 1948 (photo: official website, National Library)

Information about Wolf was scarce.

On his tombstone in Nachat Yitzchak and at the site "Yizkor" for the martyrs of Israel's systems, only the father's name, "Yitzchak" is written.

Few details are also written about the complicated life path he managed to go through in his short years of life.

There is no single version about the circumstances of his fall either.

Lazar-Aviv told a version according to which Wolf was on guard duty in a building on the outskirts of the kibbutz together with another person, a member of the Golan Gate.

When Syrian soldiers approached the position, the friend fled, Wolff was left to fight alone.

Another version, as also appeared in the "Davar" newspaper a month after the incident, describes a fraudulent exercise by the Syrians who approached the position pretending to be Jewish fighters.

They managed to kill Wolf before their identity was revealed.

In both versions, the fact is the same that a battle developed at the place, at the end of which the Syrian soldiers fled the place.

Wolf was buried in a temporary grave in Kibbutz Afikim and later his grave was moved to Nachalat Yitzhak Cemetery in Tel Aviv.

The day of the battle, June 10, 1948, was one day before the first cease-fire in the battles agreed upon by the warring parties - Israel and the Arab armies - came into effect.

On that day, the Syrians tried to achieve achievements on the northern front, mainly in the area of ​​the Hula Valley and the Upper Galilee.

The incident at the Golan Gate in the Jordan Valley is probably part of the same Syrian effort.

The battle took place only three weeks after the kibbutz was captured by the Syrian army, along with the neighboring kibbutz, Masada.

The retreat came after four days in which the kibbutzim were shelled and crushed and Syrian army forces were about to occupy them.

At first the children were evacuated and then the guardians left as well.

Five days after they were forced to retreat, the members of the Golan Gate and Masada returned to their kibbutzim that were looted, set on fire and destroyed and began to restore and rebuild them.

Israeli society and the establishment cast a stain on them in view of what was considered at the time as "abandoning the nation's assets".

Zer-Aviv tells about the life of Harry Wolf.

The memorial room at Kibbutz Sha'ar Golan, January 2023 (Photo: Eli Ashkenazi)

Zar-Aviv with Wolf's commemorative page (Photo: Eli Ashkenazi)

Coincidentally, at the same time as Zer-Aviv became interested in Wolf's life story, Irit Bashan from the organization "Let's Face the Fallen" also began to investigate Wolf's events until the day he died.

This is in a volunteer organization whose goal is to complete the details of the lives of the martyrs of Israel's systems whose biographies are unknown "in order to fulfill the debt of memory to them", as defined by the organization.

Bashen located his birth certificate and it states that Harry Wolf was born in the city of Leipzig on May 2, 1928 to the unmarried Elizabeth Wolf.

The father's name does not appear.

This detail raises questions as to why it is written on his grave that his father's name was "Yitzhak" and his mother's name is missing from the tombstone.

Now Bashan and Zer-Aviv hope that the Ministry of Defense will take care of correcting the inscription on the tombstone.

Another document reached by Bashan shows that when he was almost four years old he was given up for adoption to a couple from Frankfurt.

It was also written there that he would bear their last name - Meininger, without adding his previous last name.

But this episode was very short.

A year later the adoptive parents abandoned him and transferred him to an orphanage and his last name returned to Wolf.

Bashan points to the timing - the rise of the Nazi party to power and the anti-Semitism that began to take over Germany.

It is possible that the parents, who were German Catholics, made their decision on this background.

In the investigation she conducted, she found in Shen that the boy had moved from orphanage to orphanage and by the age of six he had already moved between three orphanages.

He was later transferred between three other institutions.

On the eve of World War II he was rescued with other children from the orphanage in Frankfurt, thanks to a rescue operation led by the directors of the orphanage, the couple Isidore and Rosa Marks.

From Frankfurt he moved to an orphanage in Hagenau in the Alsace region of France.

At all those stations, the boy Herman Lerer, who would later be called Zvi Lamdan, passed with him.

House D. where the position where Wolf was killed is located.

Kibbutz Sha'ar Golan (Photo: Eli Ashkenazi)

According to details that were already known about him, probably from Lemdan and his other friends from that period of his youth, with the German invasion of France in 1940 he went wandering around France without sufficient knowledge of the language and without a penny in his pocket.

He was helped by the activists of the OSE organization.

It was a Jewish humanitarian organization that during the war became an underground organization whose activists found hiding places for children and sometimes also managed to smuggle them into neutral countries.

Wolff pretended to be a Christian and went to churches, as an abandoned child he was chased by the Vichy French police and suspected of being a criminal.

To get a job he pretended to be German.

He suffered hunger, beatings and imprisonment.

His attempt to escape to Switzerland failed, and at the age of 16 he managed to move to Spain.

He was taken in by a delegation of the "Joint" organization and in November 1944 he arrived on a boat from Epilim to the shores of the Land of Israel.

He was educated for two years at the Ahaba Children and Youth Home in Kiryat Bialik.

The "Yizkor" website states that "through intensive study we will enable him to complete what he missed in his wanderings and find peace of mind and the joy of youth that eluded him until then."

After finishing his studies, he left with the core of his group for training at Kibbutz Ramat David.

It was also noted on the "Yizkor" website that "he aspired to a more private life in a working class."

He left the group and enlisted in the Notres, hoping to find a nucleus to establish a moshav after the year of service.

When the War of Independence began, he moved from the military to service in the "Golani" brigade.

In this framework, we were sent to the Golan Gate, which was then at the front, after the containment battles in the Jordan Valley and after the members of the Golan Gate returned to their kibbutz that was captured and liberated.

Haim-Harry Wolf (photo: official website, spokeswoman of the Ministry of Defense)

His three friends from the orphanage in France would visit his grave.

A scholar wrote about him and sent the things to Vashem.

Dorit, Lamdan's daughter, said that only after her father's death did she discover the things her father had written and that she knew almost nothing about Wolf.

During one of Yehuda Binmovich's visits, one of the Orphanage team, to Wolf's grave, he found a note she left in the tooth in the name of the organization "Let's Face the Names".

She asked whoever reads the note to contact her and add details about Wolf.

According to her, "In his case, I only applied because the mother's name was missing from the tombstone. There was already basic information about him and there was a picture of him," she explained.

When she set out on the path of investigation, she began to realize that there were more gaps in his life story than she thought and began to fill in the puzzle.

At the same time Zer-Aviv also researched his story.

Last week the journey ended in the memorial room at the Golan Gate.

Zar-Aviv hung Wolf's picture next to the members of the kibbutz and his defenders who fell in Israel's systems, and Shen said that now "Kibbutz Shaar Golan will adopt Haim-Hari Wolf and give him a kind of home 74 years after his fall, a home he never had in his life."

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