Historical Background and Interviews
II. The War The War
grouped us and I went to Kibbutz Kfar Menachem.” Named after Jean-Frangois Champollion, an early nineteenth- centuiy French Egyptologist who discovered the meaning of Egyp- tian hieroglyphs, the Champollion was initially launched in 1921 for travel between Egypt and Syria, with a maximum capacity of 450 passengers. In 1934, it was renovated and enlarged, and from November 1942 until the end of the war it was used for troop trans- ports around Algiers. When the Dror children embarked, it was 168 meters long with a gross capacity of 136,000 tons. Behira Zakay remembered it as “a heavily armored warship.’’ The children settled in on the third level, while about 400 French soldiers were on the first level. Rubinstein recalled that the children, crowded together with three or four on a hammock, were told not to speak to each other. “I was scared to death on the ship,” he said. The soldiers disembarked in Bizerte, he recalled, and were replaced by a group of Jewish refugee children; the British arrested the chil- dren and took them off the boat at the next stop but they reboarded shortly afterward. The boat arrived in Haifa on April 26, 1946. Jean-François century
1. Menachem Z Rosensafl, In Life Reborn: Jewish Displaced Persons 1945-1951 2. Michael Schneider, in Life Reborn 3. Rositta Ehrlich Kenigsberg and Romana Strochlltz Primus, In Life Reborn 4. Leonard Dinnersleln , America and the Survivors of the Holocaust , pp. 110-111 5. www.crir-marseilleprovcnce.com/hlsloire/iuirsprovence.hlin; http://mollc.wiesenihal. org/text/xl5/xml579.hlml. www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions Menachem Z. Rosensaft, in Life Reborn: Jewish Displaced Persons 1945-1951 Michael Schneider, in Rositta Ehrlich Kenigsberg and Romana Strochlitz Primus, in Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust, www.crif-marseilleprovence.com/histoire/juifsprovence.htm; http://motle.wiesenthal.org/text/x15/xml1579.html; www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions
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