The warriors

With each year, there are fewer and fewer war veterans. Israel is not an exception, even though more veterans live here than in other countries who took part in the war. Israeli veterans are true heroes that lived through all the horrors of the war that took the lives of 6 million Jews.There are about 15,000 war veterans in Israel now. The oldest one among them is now 100, the youngest is 87.

Jewish soldiers served in the armies of different countries, with about 520,000 Jews in the Red Army. After the liberation of Ukraine and Western Belarus in 1944 thousands of Jewish partisans that fought against the Nazis and the Jews that survived occupation were conscripted. There were around 300 Jewish generals in the Red Army, and most of them got their rank during the war. Among them were nine army commanders, 21 corps commanders, 43 division commanders and 130 regiment commanders.

Thousands of Jews were decorated in the course of the war, with 142 receiving the highest military award of the USSR, Hero of the Soviet Union.

Jews couldn’t surrender, because they would be shot on the spot simply because they were Jews, and for the same reason they couldn’t hope to survive under occupation, either.

Nowadays the WWII veterans living in Israel are tackling an enormous task – they don’t want the role that the Red Army played in defeating Nazism and liberating many European countries to be distorted or diminished in any way. They are against the history of WWII being revised, as is happening in the US and some European states.

They talk to the Israeli youth about WWII and they even ensured that the history books now have a special chapter called “The History of the Great Patriotic War.”
The Warriors is about the Jewish heroes and the hard work they do now.

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