Tag #127701 - Interview #89861 (Dan Mizrahy)

29th March was my mother’s birthday and a holiday for the Mizrahy household… So the day of 29th March 1941 came. It was a late winter morning with clouds and thaw. We woke up at dawn. We wished our mother ‘Happy birthday!’ with voices drowned in tears. She thanked us with the same emotions. My father, who had been discharged recently and had had his dignity of being a good Romanian citizen offended, sought to encourage us and to inspire us with a minimum of optimism. ‘Trust me’ – these were the last words which he told me on the platform of the North Railroad Station, as I was leaving towards the unknown, towards Palestine. ‘Yes, I trust you, but I don’t trust Antonescu!’ Many years later, my father would still recall this dialogue.

In Palestine

The hours that separated us from Constanta simply flew. The customs. The waiting. The embarkation. When the ship set off the evening was falling. I can’t even remember if the sea was calm or not. At dawn we had reached the Bosphorus. The disembarkation. The customs. Apart from the three suitcases and my accordion, I carried a knapsack in whose leather borders I had sewn four bills of 5 sterling pounds. This was the ‘total amount of foreign currency’ that my father possessed. He had given it to me to get by. We boarded the train in Istanbul. From this point forward, my memory began recording. 3rd class cars. Small, yellow wooden benches crammed in a car without compartments. We were wearing the same clothes we had on when we left. We didn’t have access to our luggage, which was stored in another car. We had been ordered not to leave the cars, regardless of how long the train waited in stations. And the train kept waiting… It waited more than it rode. It took four days and three nights to cross Asia Minor in the conditions described above. We reached a station and we saw French soldiers on the platform. We found out we were in Aleppo, Syria. There was a burst of joy. That same evening we stopped in Beirut, Lebanon. To our surprise, we were invited to get off the train and board the buses that were waiting for us, and we were taken to the… hotel! The following morning we found out that we were to enter Palestine by road, not by rail. I remember Beirut was full of lights, that the hotel was located downtown, that many restaurants and bars were open and that… I had no money! On the morning of 4th April 1941, a line of Palestinian buses was carrying several hundreds of passengers, most of them underage, who were coming from Romania, to the ‘Promised Land.’ At the frontier between Lebanon and Palestine, the British customs officers didn’t let us just pass. I still recall my passport with blue covers – on the first page, in the right upper corner, there was a stamp with only one word written in uppercase letters: JEW.

A few hours later, to our total amazement, the buses passed the barbed wire gates of a settlement of shacks, whose name we learnt as soon as we got off: the Atlid Camp! Armed British soldiers, policemen I think, pointed out the areas where the women and the men were supposed to gather separately. That day, soon after this ‘separation,’ my uncle had a nervous breakdown. He cried like a baby, in despair and helplessness, and I, a 15-year-old boy, was the one who comforted him and encouraged him…

Once we got over the initial shock, we realized we weren’t in a concentration camp, but in a sorting camp, and that, after our identities had been checked, we would be taken by the representatives of the Sohnut and assigned to various places.