This page on the IDF website introduces the concept of “The Last Descendants” – survivors who immigrated to Palestine alone after losing their entire families in the Holocaust, only to die fighting to establish and defend the State of Israel, leaving behind no family legacy. It tells the stories of two such individuals – Mordechai David Gantz, a survivor of Auschwitz, and Shalom Tepper, a partisan resistance fighter – who served and fell together in the Haganah during the War of Independence. The Last Descendants are commemorated at the Memorial for the Last of Kin at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
Mordechai David Gantz / Shalom Tepper