Roza Krochmalnek passed away in Berlin after complications due to COVID-19.

Fifteen-year-old Roza was already a trained nurse when she fled war-torn Europe en route to British Mandate Palestine. As one of the older refugees in the group of around 1,000 children—known as the “Tehran Children”—she tenderly cared for the youngsters, many of them orphaned, as they made their way through the Middle East to Palestine.

Born in 1928 as Roza Lerman in Tomaszow Lubelski, Poland, she fled the Nazis with her parents, Shlomo and Malka, along with three sisters and a brother.

The family fled east, first to Lvov, Ukraine (today, Lviv), only to be deported to Siberia in 1940. They later reached Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where her brother was murdered and her mother succumbed to typhus. For three years, Krochmalnek moved from place to place, eventually making her way to pre-state Israel with the group of Polish-Jewish children via Iran under the auspices of Polish Gen. Wadyslaw Anders.

After a short stint in Kibbutz Givat Brenner, she made her way back to Europe, where she met her future husband in 1951.

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