Menachem Pinkhof

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Menachem Pinkhof ( 1920 in Amsterdam - 15 July 1969 in Haifa ) was a Dutch resistance fighter during the Second World War .

Life

Pinkhof was a Jew and the youth leader of a group of German Jewish refugees who arrived there shortly before the Netherlands was occupied in 1940. Pinkhof met his future wife, Mirjam Pinkhof , a teacher at the school of the teacher Kees Boeke . When the German occupation forces and their Dutch helpers prevented Jewish children from going to school, he opened a Jewish school in the house of Mirjam's parents. When the deportation of the Jews to the East was imminent, the Pinkhofs joined the Westerweel group , led by resistance fighter Joop Westerweel , and were able to save the lives of 320 of the 821 young Zionist pioneers, 70 of whom via Spain to what was then Palestine were funneled.

Shortly after the war, Pinkhof described these impressions: “Leaving the Amsterdam ghetto. Bare hotel rooms in Paris. Full night trains to the south. Between German soldiers. A Europe that is being plowed up. Late hours in dark cities. Care for young people's lives in our hands. The Auschwitz fires burn at night and we believe in life. "

Pinkhof and his wife hid in constantly changing accommodations during their activities, but were eventually tracked down through treason and arrested in 1944. They were deported from the Westerbork transit camp to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp .

Both survived and were freed by Red Army soldiers near the Brandenburg village of Tröbitz on April 23, 1945 from a death transport known as the Lost Train , which was supposed to bring them to Theresienstadt together with 2,500 other exchange Jews . On May 13, 1945, they set off for their homeland on bicycles and, after crossing the Dutch border on June 9, 1945, handed over a memorandum to the Foreign Office in The Hague , informing the Western Allies of their whereabouts learned of this transport.

In 1946 they emigrated to Palestine (from 1948 Israel ), where Pinkhof died in 1969. Menachem and Mirjam Pinkhof are the parents of Yehuda Afek , who is a professor of mathematics and computer science.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Erika Arlt : The Jewish memorials Tröbitz, Wildgrube, Langennaundorf and Schilda in the Elbe-Elster district. Ed .: Elbe-Elster district, Herzberg 1999, p. 15.