Accident of Fate: A Personal Account, 1938–1945

Epilogue

7A 195 EPILOGUE The first thing I did when I reached Italy was to try and locate my brother Max, who was in England. I knew that if my mother was still alive, she would also contact him. I illed in the forms at the Red Cross bureau in Bari and waited. To my relief, I soon received word from him—although there was no trace of my mother. Max hitched a ride on a military transport plane and lew to see us. ▴ Bari, southern Italy, 1945: (l. to r.) my brother Max, Uncle Julius, Uncle Robert, and me. 81118 001-226.pdf_out 6/17/114:15 PM K 195 FI 196 EPILOGUE Max had survived by escaping from Vienna to England in 1939, as part of a Zionist agricultural training program. He later volunteered for the British navy and become an intelligence oicer. His dutiesincludedlisteninginonGermanradiocommunicationsand translating them into English. When he had enlisted, he had been told to change his Germanic-sounding name, in order to avoid execution as a traitor in the event of capture. He had changed it from Maximilian Rochlitz to John Michael George Rock, a name he kept for the rest of his life. It had been a wise precaution, as two of the ships he served on during the war were torpedoed. The sinking of one of them, a Canadian destroyer, became the subject of a book and of a documentary ilm, Unlucky Lady: The Life and Death of HMCS Athabaskan (2001). Of the 261 sailors on board, 128 lost their lives. Some of the men who abandoned ship werecapturedbytheGermans,butMax,fortunately,wasrescued. He emigrated to the United States in 1949 and lived for the rest of his life in Seattle, where he died in 2004 at the age of eighty-two. My aim was to get to the United States as soon as possible. While I waited for a visa, I obtained a job with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in Bari. I was delighted, because it permitted me, inally, to wear a US army uniform. Later, I moved to Rome, where I worked as a welfare oicer for the American Joint Distribution Committee (the Jewish relief organization that, apparently, had supplied the trucks for our evacuation from Yugoslavia). My main responsibilities were to organize the supply of food, clothing, and personal necessities to several hundred Holocaust survivors who were housed in displaced persons camps on the outskirts of Rome. The British were then the mandatory power in Palestine, and they severely restricted Jewish immigration. The Allies had permitted the Joint Distribution Committee to run these camps, on the understanding that British restrictions would be respected. My unoicial task, however, was to facilitate the illegal immigration of these refugees to Palestine. Aliya Bet, the underground Jewish immigration network, would alert me every time they were about to evacuate refugees to a ship standing ready of the Italian coast. I would make sure not to visit the camps on that day; Aliya Bet operatives would evacuate the inmates to the ship (often with 81118 001-226.pdf_out 6/17/114:15 PM K 196 7A 197 EPILOGUE the complicity of the Italian authorities, who delighted in infuriating the British) and replenish the camps with an identical number of newly arrived refugees. When I resumed my visits, I would duly report that the number of camp inmates had remained unchanged, pointedly ignoring the fact that they were all fresh faces. This went on for many months and involved several hundred refugees. In 1947, I received my long-awaited immigration visa and set sail for the United States. Thanks to a scholarship from a Jewish charity, the Hillel Foundation, I was able to attend the University of Washington, in Seattle. Later, I graduated from New York University Law School, got married, and had four children. But I’ll tell you about that another time. 81118 001-226.pdf_out 6/17/114:15 PM K 197 ...