Approximately 1.5 million children were murdered during the Holocaust. Chaim Rafael Gertel z”l was one of those children.
Chaim Rafael was born in Hrubieszów, Poland. When the Germans declared that the town was to be Judenrein (“clean of Jews”) in October 1942, Chaim and his mother went into hiding along with a number of others. In order to enter the hideout, they had to open a cabinet, pull out a drawer, and crawl into a hole they built in the ground that led to a cellar. One night, two people left the hideout to fetch some water. They were spotted by two Polish men who then informed the Germans. The next night, the Germans entered the hideout and marched the Jews to the town’s Jewish cemetery, where they were shot and buried in a mass grave. Chaim was only 8 years old.
Today, on #YomHaShoah, we remember Chaim and the millions of other victims of the Holocaust.
Contributor: Jill G. Mundinger
