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Jewish Nurse in Sweden Brought 60 Refugee Children to Mandatory Palestine during World War II
(Ha'aretz) Dina Kraft - In March 1941, Ilse Ganz Koppel, 22, a Swedish Jewish nurse, boarded a train in Stockholm with 60 Jewish refugee children and three other adult chaperones and set out for Mandatory Palestine. Now 100 and living in Jerusalem, she shared her account of the rescue mission that took 16 days and covered 3,500 miles. The children had arrived in Stockholm through Copenhagen from Germany, Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, sent by parents desperately hoping they would reach safety. Their route took them to northern Sweden, then to Helsinki and Leningrad, and then southward to Odessa. They crossed the Black Sea by boat, stopping in a Bulgarian port before reaching Istanbul. They then took a train through Syria to Beirut in Lebanon, where cars were waiting to take them to kibbutzim in Palestine. Just before the trip, Ganz Koppel married Hans Schuman, one of the adults accompanying the youngsters. She did not know him before the fake marriage, but needed to share his resident status in Mandatory Palestine in order to legally travel there. She lost contact with Schuman after the trip ended.