A childhood in Benghazi, a bar mitzvah in Bergen-Belsen

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Joseph Labi kept the prayer shawl he received in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany until his dying day. He was 17 at the time, and had lost both his parents. According to one version of events, a religious Jewish prisoner in the camp suggested that he celebrate his bar mitzvah, which he had missed because of his misfortunes.

“He told me, ‘come and pray,’ Labi said. “I told him that I didn’t know how to pray and that I had never had a bar mitzvah. Then he brought together ten men and they made me a bar mitzvah. It was hard for me, because no one from my family was there to celebrate with me.”

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According to another version, one of the women prisoners dreamed that Rabbi Eliyahu Labi, Joseph’s grandfather, asked her to celebrate his bar mitzvah, and promised that afterward, the prisoners would be liberated from the camp. “He asked me to share food with those present, but I only had a small potato,” Labi said. “Fortunately, a woman secured some perfume. I poured some on everyone’s hand and that was my bar mitzvah.”

Labi was born in 1928 in Benghazi, Libya, into a large family. His father, Mordechai, owned a fabric store. He was married twice; his first wife, Esther, gave birth to seven children. After she died, he married Rachel, who bore ten more. One of them was Joseph.

In 1938, when Joseph was just 10 years old, the seven worst years of his life began. Mussolini’s fascist Italy, which ruled Libya, passed the race laws against the Jews. Labi would later describe how the Jewish students were moved to a separate school, whose door was marked with a Star of David. Two years later his parents died, and his brother took him under his wing.

Joseph Labi.Yad Vashem

In 1942, the entire family was taken to the Jadu concentration camp in Libya. Foreign citizens were deported to Italy on the pretext that their loyalty to the state was dubious and their presence worsened the lack of food; Joseph, who held British citizenship, was sent there that year.

Joseph was imprisoned in the town of Castelnovo ne’ Monti. In 1944, the Germans put him on a train from there to Bergen-Belsen by the Germans. On the way, partisans bombed the train, Labi said. In the middle of the journey, at one of the stops, he managed to get some bread and cheese, when suddenly the train started up again without him. “I started to run after it. Why didn’t I run away? I was afraid,” he said.

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At first he refused to eat in the camp because the food was not kosher. But after a week of hunger, he had to eat to stay alive. “I wanted to live,” even though death was everywhere, he attested.

In March 1945, Labi was sent to France as part of a prisoner exchange between Britain and Germany, and from there to Spain and Portugal. “When we reached Lisbon, we realized that hell was over for us,” he said. He returned to Benghazi and worked at the British Army canteen. While there, he met soldiers from the Jewish Brigade, who suggested he go to Palestine.

He traveled to Palestine disguised in a Jewish Brigade uniform, posing as a soldier, together with seven other young men. “The put a lot of documents in my pocket so they would look like a passport. I got on the train dressed as a soldier,” he said.

Joseph Labi lights a torch in Jerusalem on Holocaust Memorial Day, in 2016.Olivier Fitoussi

After he reached Alexandria, Egypt he was smuggled via truck to Palestine. There he lived in several kibbutzim, volunteered for the pre-state Palmach underground and fought in the War of Independence in the Battle of the Kastel, as part of the Sixth Battalion of the Harel Brigade. Later, her served in the Golani Brigade.

In 1952, at age 25, he met his future wife, Yvonne Duani. Joseph, who went by the nickname Joe, worked in construction, building the Lod airport. Yvonne had come to the site to attend the ceremony for the return to Israel of the body of Eliezer Kaplan, the deputy prime minister who had died while vacationing abroad. She was 15 years old.

Joseph and Yvonne were relatives. She was born in Benghazi nine years after him, and her father was a shoe importer and salesman. According to the family, he hosted Mussolini in his shop on one of his visits to the city. Il Dulce even held Yvonne’s hand and kissed her cheek.

Joseph and Yvonne married in 1954. They moved together to London and from there to the United States, where Joseph worked in construction. In the 1970s, they returned to Israel. They had a son, a daughter, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and they lived in a building in Bat Yam that Joseph had built with his own hands. On Holocaust Memorial day In 2016, Joseph lit a torch at Yad Vashem.