For Shmuel Armal, a retired Dan bus driver from Tel Aviv, the long, difficult road he has traveled from the small Polish village of Vishlov where he was born in 1928, is still a rough and torturous one.

The youngest of seven children raised by a widowed mother, Shmuel experienced the brutality of World War II soon after the Germans invaded Poland. "Food was very scarce and people were going hungry," he recalls. One day, he joined his married older brother on a trip to purchase food from farmers in the countryside several hours away. On the way home, with a horse and cart borrowed from the farmer, they were stopped by German soldiers who held the child at gunpoint and, finding rope in the cart, prepared to hang him. When one soldier convinced his comrade that hanging the boy was a waste of time, Shmuel was savagely beaten until he collapsed in the snow and rolled into a frozen river, lying motionless as the Germans stole the horse and galloped off.

That was just his first encounter with cruel soldiers. Short and slight of build, Shmuel was able to slip across the nearby Hungarian border unnoticed, and he often smuggled in supplies for his family and neighbors. "A week before Pesach," he remembers, "my mother sent me to meet a Jewish family over the border and buy wine and other holiday essentials from them." Shmuel successfully made it to Hungary and bought the food. But returning to the border, he was caught by Hungarian guards who discovered the wine and broke open the bottles for themselves while confiscating his other purchases. The guards then beat him ruthlessly. Severely bruised and bleeding, the boy managed to drag himself home in the cold darkness. When, nearly frozen, he opened the door to his home, he found his family and other villagers anxiously awaiting their Pesach supplies. But there was no food for the Jews that Pesach.

"Food was always so scarce that my mother fed us only at night, so we would have the strength to sleep through until morning," Shmuel sighs. Nevertheless, the family remained strong until the terrible day in 1943 when the Germans burst into their home. "I ran to the forest, not realizing that I would never again see my mother, my oldest brother, his wife and their three children," he says sadly. Later, Shmuel found his sister, who had been sent by their mother to search for him in the forest.

The two youngsters waited until nightfall and then sneaked over the Hungarian border, where Jews disguised them as peasants and put them on a train to Munkacz. Then they were sent to Budapest and sheltered by a well-to-do Jewish family for six months. Finally, they were given Czech papers and placed on a youth aliyah transport, traveling by train through Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Lebanon to Palestine.

When they finally arrived at the Atlit detention camp, they were greeted by the legendary Henrietta Szold. "She lifted me onto her lap, stroked my hair and asked where I would feel most at home in Palestine," Shmuel remembers. "She asked me if I came from a religious home, had me recite blessings for her, and told me I would go to the Kfar Hanoar Hadati. I insisted, 'Only with my sister!' and it was done."

For three years, as they studied and learned Hebrew, Shmuel and his fellow immigrants, worked to create new agricultural settlements. Under the auspices of the school, they joined the group that established Kibbutz Be'erot Yitzhak. Then, on the night after Yom Kippur in 1946, the students were quickly organized for a secret mission: staking out Jewish territory in the Negev by creating facts on the ground. "We built Kfar Darom overnight by hastily erecting roofed huts that would meet British legal criteria defining a settlement." Shmuel relates. "The days that followed were filled with frenzied activity as we sought water sources and guarded the area. The Jewish Agency and Solel Boneh joined our efforts, which culminated in the establishment of the Negev Water Line."

The United Nations declaration of partition in 1948 brought immediate Arab attacks and a siege on the settlement. "Our huts were burned and destroyed. Many in my group were injured or died. No food could get through to us. The Haganah advised us to hold fast, but even though we begged for help they couldn't break through the siege to send us reinforcements." Even Israel's fledgling air force tried to help-including Ezer Weizmann in his Piper Cub-to no avail.

When the settlement finally received some British contraband ammunition, Shmuel was placed in charge of the weapons. "We were so proud of our guns and hand grenades, but weapons were so scarce that we had orders to shoot only when the Arabs were actually tearing down our fence," Shmuel says. "We buried the weapons to hide them. Incredibly, we were able to hold on for seven months. We spent almost all of that time in underground bunkers and buried our dead alongside us." When the order to surrender finally came, the weakened survivors took whatever weapons remained, along with their sefer torah, and fled by night. "The Arabs didn't realize we'd abandoned the area," Shmuel smiles. "They continued shelling our settlement for three more days.

"After that, some of my group continued fighting for the Negev. But I had lost so many friends that I couldn't join them." Instead, Shmuel joined the Givati Brigade in the battles for Jerusalem.

Fifty years later, after retiring from the Dan bus lines where he worked from 1951 to 1991, Shmuel has been honored by the renewed settlement of Kfar Darom and received by President Weizmann at a special reception at the President's Residence. "I'm proud that I contributed to building the country," he says.

But the terrible shadow of the Holocaust is his constant companion. "I have terrible problems sleeping, because the memories keep rushing back to me," he reveals. "I go for therapy at AMCHA and it helps me tremendously. But I also belong to a group there with other survivors from Hungary, Poland and Holland. And as terrible as my experiences were, I hear many worse things from others."

	Menachem Perlmutter
	Baruch Fettman
	Miriam and Yehuda Goldman
	Amb. Benjamin Navon
	Prof. Zvi Eyal