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How Britain's Jewish Troops Rescued Holocaust Survivors Trying to Reach Palestine
(The Times-UK) Mark Bridge - The People on the Beach, by Rosie Whitehouse, describes how Jewish soldiers in the British Army were instrumental in helping more than 1,000 Jews escape from postwar Europe on a ship that got through a Royal Navy blockade of Palestine. The British army's Jewish Brigade, formed in 1944, included thousands of Jewish volunteers from Palestine, mainland Europe and Britain. The unit wore a Star of David as its insignia and was stationed in northern Italy at the end of the war. The book, published this week, charts how brigade members crossed into Austria, Germany and eastern Europe, against orders, and took survivors in army trucks to displaced-persons camps in Italy. Their actions went directly against British policy seeking to prevent mass migration of Jews to Palestine. "They drove all the way to Lodz in Poland, turned up in the courtyard of the children's home and loaded the kids into the British army trucks to drive them over the border," said Whitehouse. Akiva Kohane, a survivor of Auschwitz who was 15 at the time, remembered: "I will never forget when they came in with their truck. They had a Star of David marked on the truck. I got a shock when I looked inside the driver's cabin as there were two Tommy guns with the Star of David on them."