Wolbrom After the Holocaust
Commemoration in Israel
Avraham Blat
After the war, most of the survivors from Wolbrom made their way to Israel. The majority of them were recruited to the defense forces in the War of Independence. Among those who fell was Avraham Blat, born in Wolbrom, the “last survivor” of his family. (The “last survivors” – 144 Holocaust survivors, the only remaining remnant of their families, immigrated to Israel after the war. Here they hoped to find solace for their pain and rebuild their lives, but they fell in the battle to establish the State of Israel.)
The only son of Leah and Eliezer Blat, Avraham was born on October 5, 1925, in the town of Wolbrom. At the age of six he began to learn in cheder, but when he was 13 he was forced to terminate his studies because of the outbreak of the war. Until 1941, he lived with his parents in the city of Bendin. That same year, at the age of 15, he was snatched from his parents and sent to different labor camps. At first, he still received information about his parents, but after a while he was told that they had been executed. He drifted from camp to camp, until he was brought to Auschwitz. There he suffered from cold, hunger and disease, but managed to survive until liberation.
With the war’s end, together with a group of 15 young men and women, Avraham founded the “Buchenwald Kibbutz”. He immigrated to Eretz Israel on the deck of a ship on September 8, 1945. At first he joined Kibbutz Ofakim, and then moved to live in Bat Yam. He worked in the postal service, in printing and in a factory.
Avraham was recruited to a fighting unit to protect the Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel on March 20, 1948. He joined the Negev brigade, and was sent to Kfar Darom. On May 11, 1948, during an attack on Kfar Darom, a shell hit the roof of the station he was in, and he was killed. He was buried in the military cemetery in Nahalat Yitzhak. Avraham was 23 years old when he died.
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Valley of the Communities
The name ‘Wolbrom’ has been engraved on a wall in Valley of the Communities at Yad Vashem.
The Valley of the Communities is a site that commemorates the names of thousands of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust – a memorial to the Jewish world that was, but is no longer.
The Valley extends over an area of 10 dunams, at the western end of Yad Vashem. The names of more than 5,000 communities are inscribed on 107 walls.
