The Incredible Survival Story of the Pancho Shipwreck

It was a freezing stormy night. The massive ship, named "Stephano" and weighing 279 tons, was being swept by the wind. Five hundred passengers screamed in terror with each wave that tossed their ship skyward, only to slam it down into the depths. At midnight, the ship crashed onto rocky shores of a desolate, isolated island, and the passengers were thrown onto the sand. They knew no one was aware of their existence and no one would search for them. Desperate, they began climbing the hills in the center of the island until they discovered a spring, around which they spent the next ten days. They drew SOS signs with wood and stones all over the island, but to no avail.

After several days, the survivors sent five teenagers in a lifeboat, hoping they might reach an inhabited land and report about the hundreds of survivors on the island. However, the boat was lost in the vast sea. The boys wandered for many days, delirious with fever day and night, until they were eventually found hospitalized in Alexandria, Egypt, with no known recollection of their journey.

At this point, it sounds like a classic 17th-century adventure tale in the style of "Treasure Island," but it is not. This event took place about eighty years ago, and some survivors lived here in Israel and wrote books about their ordeal. This episode involved the immigrant ship known as "Pancho," which sailed in May 1940 from the port of Bratislava, Slovakia. It carried five hundred passengers, a hundred of whom were affluent Jews from Bratislava escaping Europe just before the Nazi occupation. Generously, they funded the entire voyage, including four hundred additional Jews who boarded the ship. Passports for Paraguay, a neutral South American country, were organized for all passengers. They sailed on the Danube through Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, but for four months, no European port would supply them with food or fuel because their passports were deemed "bogus" and not authentic. Ports feared trouble with the Nazis.

Eventually, a group of Bulgarian Jews took it upon themselves to acquire food and fuel, delivering these supplies to the ship with great determination, allowing it to head toward the Black Sea and Israel. The plan was to refuel on the island of Samos, but due to the war, fuel couldn't be procured, and the ship redirected to the Greek island of Piraeus. During the voyage, water ran out, and continuing was impossible. The captain had no choice but to siphon water from the steam boiler and fill it with seawater. The steam boiler was not designed to handle seawater, thus it exploded in the dead of night, shaking the whole ship. The vessel lost navigational ability and was tossed by the waves, trapped in currents and storms, eventually wrecking on the barren island shores, now known as "Kamli," a tiny two-kilometer island with virtually no resources.

After ten days on the island, an Italian aircraft spotted the SOS signals left by survivors, and two ships from Rhodes set out to rescue them. However, the Italians, part of the Axis powers, detained them in a camp on Rhodes Island, where they lived for a long period in tents under harsh conditions. The Italians had ruled Rhodes for some time, and their treatment of Jews was harsh and brutal. Just before the war, the Italians decided to build a park on the site of a Jewish cemetery. Pleas were of no avail, and the Jews were forced to relocate all their deceased who had rested there peacefully for hundreds of years, and a municipal park was planted in its place.

After several months, the Italians unexpectedly decided to transfer the "Pancho" survivors to a detention camp in Italy. Thus, they were spared the grim fate of Rhodes' Jews, most of whom were sent to concentration camps. Specifically, out of 1673 sent to Auschwitz, only 151 survived. An additional 42 were saved by the Turkish Consul, Salahattin Ülkümen, who issued them fake Turkish citizenship. Even when "Pancho" survivors were moved to detention in Italy, they were not sent to death camps like other Italian Jews, sparing their lives. In 1943, the area was liberated by The Jewish Brigade, and ultimately, "Pancho" passengers achieved their dream of reaching Israel.