Zeev Canter

He immigrated to Toronto with his family at the age of five. He joined the airforce in August 1941, got his wings the following year and was then shipped to England for active service.
In April 1943, his bomber was shot down over Stuttgart and he was the crew’s lone survivor. He parachuted out and his leg was broken on impact. He lay in hiding on the ground for nine days, kept alive by a German family who took pity on him and fed him until the resistance arrived and smuggled him out of Germany - to Gibraltar, then Switzerland and finally England before returning home to Canada.
After a month's rest he returned to England to resume his bombing missions. In May 1944, his plane was shot down again. With two others he again managed to parachute out, but this time he was captured by the Germans near Dusseldorf. He was interrogated at length by the Gestapo. “To this day, I don’t know how I got out of there alive,” he told later told his mother, but provided few other details.
He was one of the organizers of the famed 1944 “Great Escape” from the German Stalag Luft III prisoner of war camp for British and commonwealth airmen in which fifty pilots were caught and executed. Canter had yet to pass through the tunnels dug under the fence when the others were captured, and was this saved again. This chapter in WWII history was later turned into the blockbuster movie starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough.
Just before Germany was conquered by the allies the remaining war prisoners were moved east. Canter escaped in transit and managed to connect with an English unit and was eventually awarded a DFM by the King. In 1945 he returned to Canada.
He arrived in Israel on Aug. 5, 1948 with the first volunteer pilots and joined the 103 squadron in Ramat David. He flew "Dakota" planes primarily in supply missions to units that were surrounded by Egyptian forces and the Sodom, which was accessible only by air.
He was one of five Jewish Canadian pilots with WWII experience who served in the Israeli air force.
On Oct. 24, 1948, shortly before midnight, he took off from Sde Dov in Tel Aviv toward Sodom with a supply. Ten minutes after takeoff, his right engine caught fire. He redirected, in an attempt to reach the Tel Nof base for an emergency landing. The plane blew up in the air and crashed. All the crew was killed, including Canter. He was brought to rest at the military cemetery in Rehovot.