KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
Palestine. He had gone to a movie, however, and so was not reg- istered with his friends. Aharon and thirty-nine others were given legal papers to enter Palestine. Near Marseilles, the children probably stayed in Grand Arenas, a former military camp that was the main transit camp in the area for Jewish survivors immigrating to Palestine. (This and other camps near Marseilles later sheltered the Jewish refugees from the boat Exodus, as well as Egyptian Jews in 1956, Moroccan and Tunisian Jews in 1961, and Algerian Jews in 1962.) 5 From Marseilles, as many as fifteen hundred Jewish children from youth movements including Dror, HaShomer HaTzair, and Mizrahi boarded a ship, the Champollion, for Palestine. Moshe Furshpan, the boy who had been with Aharon when his feet froze, was one of the children on the Champollion. After the war, he had stayed in the village of Levaches (“They treated me so nicely and gave me food, clothes, and shoes, and invited me to stay in the vil- lage,” he said), but he was desperate to find his family. A Levaches villager named Ludwig took him to Koretz twice in hopes of find - ing news of his family, telling him, “Over here are some Jews, and if you go and find somebody and want to stay with them, OK, but if you don’t find anybody and have nowhere to stay, come back here and I’ll take you home.” On the second trip to Koretz, Furshpan found a family to stay with for a couple of days, then hitchhiked to Rovno with another child. “That’s where I met Aharon again, and other people from Ludvipol. Then someone took me to Lublin and an orphanage for Jewish children there accepted me.” The orphan- age relocated to East Germany, Furshpan said, after which “some- one from Israel was looking around for kids to emigrate to Israel, and took us — we were maybe sixty or one hundred children. The manager called me in one day and told me I was too young to emigrate, that I should stay, but others said, ‘Come with us.’ For some reason, they took us back to Poland briefly, and then I was on the same boat as Aharon Golub, the Champollion, which left from France. I remember being part of a group of about one hun- dred kids. The delegates who brought us out from the orphanage
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