A group of former Partisan fighters – members of a ragtag guerilla army that hounded the Nazis in Europe during World War II – visited an Israel Air Force base Sunday, just 36 hours before Holocaust Remembrance Day and the opening of the Durban II conference featuring Holocaust denier and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Some of the veterans proudly wore medals they received from the Soviet Red Army for their heroism during the war. One showed his hosts in the IAF a medal he received for killing two Luftwaffe pilots. 
IAF officer briefs Partisans
(Channel 2 screenshot)
Another one of the former fighters, a woman with a number from a concentration camp tattooed on her forearm, now hardly visible because of her age, clapped her hands when an IAF F-16 slowly rolled past the group, when they visited the squadron’s hangars to see a pair of jets take off in a drill. The others covered their ears because of the din of the jet engines.
The woman asked an IAF officer if the pilots under his command could reach Iran. “They can reach anywhere,” he answered. She was pleased with the answer. A woman in a wheelchair told the pilots: “What I ask of you is to make sure that there will not be another Holocaust.”
An IAF officer spoke before the Partisans in the briefing room and said: “The challenges we face are much less complex than the ones you faced, because we were born into a state of our own and grew up in it, and our job is to guard it."