This Is Nes Gadol: One More Who Was Saved from the Ship Struma

Mr Arnold 'Noli' Engler was born in Czernowitz, Romania, in 1927. Noli was the only son of the Jewish Engler family. In 1940 they moved to Bucharest and opened a business. But in 1941 they began to suffer intense antisemitism and decided that young Noli should leave Romania, and they at once set about buying a ticket on the ship STRUMA. With great difficulty they managed to get the last ticket for the ship. They came to the port to see Noli board the ship and flee from Constanța, the port on the Black Sea. His mother, who saw the ship Struma close up, began to scream and said to her son, with the premonition she had: 'I will not let you board and travel on this ship, rotten on every side.' Noli's intelligent mother saw that the ship was very old and was greatly troubled, understanding that the ship would not survive the voyage on the Black Sea.

Her husband, Noli's father, protested strongly against his wife's act, because he thought this ship might be Noli's only chance to flee the country. With good reason, it was she who won, and poor Noli had to stay in Romania, without understanding much of what was going on; but he stayed alive, and was saved from the terrible end of the ship and of those who were on the Struma. The end of the Struma caused a great shock in the family, and they could not believe the miracle (nes) that had happened to them.

At the end of 1941, in December, they had another chance: to be in the group of young people that the Jewish Agency (Agence Juive) was organizing to smuggle to Palestine. It was a group of 60 children, hidden in a train that was to reach Istanbul. When the train entered Bulgaria, the Gestapo rounded up all the children over 13. Noli hid behind the suitcases on top of the seats. The Gestapo officer who came back into the train to check whether any Jew remained, saw that none was left, and began to leave the compartment. Suddenly Noli's tefillin fell from his head, slipping off from the sweat and the immense emotion the boy felt.

The German officer looked up, saw Noli's eyes, looked at him, looked at him and looked at him... Without a word he turned his back and left the train. Another 'nes gadol' that saved Noli Engler once more... To this day Arnold (Noli), who lives in the United States, has found no explanation for this unimaginable act of the Gestapo. He alone survived of the 60 children, who disappeared in Auschwitz. When the train entered Sirkeci and Noli saw the minarets of Sultanahmet and Ayasofya, he could no longer hold back the emotion of being saved and began to cry for hours and hours. In Istanbul the Jewish community took charge of protecting Noli for a few months before sending him to Palestine by way of Syria and Lebanon.

While he was in Istanbul, Noli went every day to the Ashkenazi synagogue of Yüksekkaldırım. When he reached Palestine, his uncles and aunts, who had emigrated in the 1920s and 1930s, took charge of bringing Noli up. He took part in the War of Independence in 1948 with the Haganah, and in 1949 joined the Tsahal. He studied at the University of Jerusalem and completed his doctorate in nuclear physics at a university in Switzerland. After his studies in Switzerland he moved to the United States and became a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). In 1995 Arnold (Noli) came to Istanbul to attend the wedding of his son Jonathan with Beki Behar of Caddebostan, in the Ashkenazi synagogue, and he remembered again all this adventure that had passed through his head and shaped his life full of miracles. This story of his father was told to me by Jonathan, who came with Beki and their children to visit Beki's father and mother, who today live in Caddebostan. This is what we can call Nes Gadol.