Chajim Farkaš

* 1929

  • "By the forty-fifth or forty-sixth year, you go back to the army for one month every year. During the Six-Day War I was in the army, not as a soldier. It was because of... What do you call it? Not people between 18 and 21, but everybody else was in the reserve army. So everyone was a soldier in the Six Day War. Not just the soldiers, but the reserves. They went into the army too."

  • "In the Yom Kippur War, I was not so young anymore. That was in 1973, so I was about 50, 45. So I was in the army, but I was sitting in an office. And at the end of the war, they told me, 'You don't have to go to war every year anymore.' After the Yom Kippur War, I stopped being a soldier."

  • "A four-year journey during the war from Bratislava to Palestine. Four years. The ship sank. And then we came to Israel. Here I joined the partisans. There was no Israel yet, there was the British Mandate - maybe you know about it, maybe you don't. Anyway, we fought with the British as partisans, underground organizations. I came here in 1944 and in 1945 I joined the Irgun. One of those organizations was called 'ha-cva'i ha-le'umi'. I was in it until 1948 and then I joined the Israeli army. And I was in the army as a combatant in all those very famous wars: 1948, 1956, Sinai, the Six-Day War."

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    Tel Aviv (Izrael), 28.07.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 34:20
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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Everyone says it used to be better or worse, but that’s life

Khayim Farkash in 2022 in his Tel Aviv apartment
Khayim Farkash in 2022 in his Tel Aviv apartment
photo: Post Bellum

Khajim Farkash was born on 8 May 1929 in the town of Khust in Subcarpathian Ruthenia (today’s Ukraine). Together with his mother Gisela, he sailed to Palestine on the steamer Pentcho on May 18, 1940. When the ship was wrecked, Italian ships took them to the island of Rhodes, where they were transferred to the Ferramonti concentration camp in 1942. It was liberated in 1943. A year later, Khayyim and his mother arrived in what was then Palestine and met his father Shlomo. A year later, Khayim joined the Irgun and participated in several sabotage operations against the then British Mandate in Palestine. After the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, he entered compulsory military service, after which he fought in the War of Independence, during the Suez Crisis, in the Six-Day War as a member of the ground forces, and during the Yom Kippur War as a coordinator. From 1951, Khayim Farkash was in the business of importing marble from Italy. At the time of filming in 2022, Khayim Farkash was living in Tel Aviv with his wife Ruth and their five children.