Emil Brig

Emil Brig was born in 1924 in Tarnów

Emil Brig was born in 1924 in Tarnów, Poland. When World War II began, he escaped the Tarnów ghetto to the east and reached Bukovina, where he was caught and taken to a killing pit but survived. Later he and his father jumped from a train heading to a concentration camp and joined partisans in the Carpathian Mountains, where his father died.

In Hungary he joined a Zionist youth movement, was arrested and sentenced to death. The arrival of the Red Army stopped his execution on the day it was set. He then joined the Red Army and moved to the Land of Israel after the war.

He lived in Tel Yitzhak for 2 years and was a member of the Haganah. In the War of Independence he served in the Golani Brigade in the Jordan Valley. On the day independence was declared, he blew up the remaining bridges near Kibbutz Gesher after 2 of 3 charges failed.

After the war he took part in searching for Nazi war criminals in Europe. In Tel Aviv he founded Castel, an office selling show tickets, and he published an autobiography. He died in 2002 and was buried in the Kiryat Shaul military cemetery.