In 1868, a group of German evangelical Christians, calling themselves Templers, landed in Haifa. They believed the second coming of Christ could be hastened by building a spiritual kingdom in the Holy Land.
Within years they had built seven settlements around the country, including Sarona in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem’s quietly elegant German Colony, where they played a central role in the modernisation of Palestine by construction, agriculture, commerce, industry and transportation.
There they remained for more than seven decades. But the outbreak of World War Two changed everything for the Templers — and saved the lives of a few hundred Jews, among them a young woman called Ruth Jacobsohn.
Ruth never spoke about her wartime experiences during her life. But when she died in 1998, her family discovered tapes she had made, telling an almost forgotten story of survival against the odds.
Ruth’s father, Mor, was born in Jaffa in 1890, then part of the Ottoman empire. In his twenties he moved to Berlin where he lodged with a family and fell in love with their fifteen-year-old daughter, Sida, whom he later married.
As a result of the marriage Mor’s wife and children— Ruth and her brothers Stephen, Ori and Etan — automatically became Turkish nationals.
In the recording Ruth explains that in 1935 the Turks withdrew their citizenship from Jews in Germany.
“We had to send our passports back to Turkey but we kept the other Turkish ID papers so whenever there were check-ups, we said: ‘We are foreigners, Turks’, showed our papers and were left in peace. We knew that we were no longer Turkish but pretended that this was the case.
“The German authorities were unsure about the situation. We told them that we were expecting to receive our passports back any time. This went on for a few years until the Germans decided that we were as stateless as everyone else. As a result, we were put on the lists for deportation.”
In early October 1943, the Nazis sent Ruth and her parents to the internment centre in Grosse Hamburger Strasse where men and women were separated. From there Ruth and her mother were sent to the women-only Ravensbruck concentration camp.
At Ravensbruck they had a glimmer of hope. They discovered that they were being considered for an exchange programme being negotiated by the International Red Cross between the British Mandate, the Germans and the British.
The plan was to send the Templers of Palestine, where they had been interned as enemy aliens, back to Germany — and in their place allow a group of Jews to escape to the Holy Land. The Jewish community in Mandate Palestine had lobbied for this to take place.
The Jews with a “Palestinian Certificate” who qualified for the exchange became known as ‘The Istanbul List’. Ten came from the German town of Laufen and fifty were from the French town of Vitel. But the largest contingent — 222 Jews— came from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
From Ravensbruck, Ruth and her mother were sent to another internment camp. From there, mother and daughter together with six other women went to Laufen in Upper Bavaria.
There, Ruth, then 24, met and fell in love with Max, who was to become her husband. From there they all travelled to the huge camp in Vittel in France, arriving there in the spring of 1944. Ruth observed regular transports from Vittel to Auschwitz.
“Every day people died and others were sent on transports, so we feared that we would be sent on the wrong one,” she recounted, years later.
Eventually, Ruth and her mother were put on a train to Nancy, before arriving in Vienna where they were taken to a homeless shelter. There, they were joined by the large transport from Bergen-Belsen.
Chaya Brasz, a Dutch historian who lives in Israel, wrote Transport 222 about the Bergen-Belsen inmates that formed part of the 1944 exchange.
“The 222 exchanged persons from the Netherlands were not on the Istanbul list but on lists made up by the Jewish Agency for “veteran Zionists” — people not living in Palestine but in Holland,” explains Brasz. “They were known as Zionists and the criterion was that they had to have close relatives living in Palestine.”
“These people were in a terrible state, skeletons, still in their prison garb with the yellow star, just as you will have seen on film,” remembered Ruth.
“After one night there, none of us believed that we were destined for Palestine. The Gestapo had taken away our little suitcases so we had nothing left and were convinced that we would be going to Auschwitz; the end was looming.”
However, the next morning the large group was taken to the train station. For twelve days and nights, in the midst of constant bombing, they made their way to Istanbul where they were welcomed by the local Jewish community, who handed them a large bag of food.
“As soon as we had vacated the train, it was filled with the Germans who had lived in Palestine, who were then transported back to Germany whereas we boarded Turkish trains.”
From Turkey, Ruth and her group travelled to Syria and onwards to Palestine, reaching Haifa on 10 July 1944. Eventually, Ruth and her mother settled in Petach Tikvah where they were later joined by Max. Ruth’s three brothers and father all survived the war and were reunited soon after.
Ruth married Max in January 1946 and later that year her daughter Shoshanah was born in Palestine. A few years later the Plaut family moved back to Germany, forging a new Jewish community in Bremen where their other children Rafael and Manuela were born.
Max, a lawyer, worked on a number of trials of local Nazis as well as becoming a lecturer on the Holocaust and Judaism. He also helped Jewish survivors to make claims against the German government. Shoshanah moved to England as a student in 1967, eventually becoming a teacher of French and German.
Growing up in Bremen, Shoshanah knew nothing about her parents’ wartime experiences. It was only when she went to Hamburg for her mother’s funeral in 1998 that she discovered her recording.
“My mother had such a capacity for happiness and enjoying everything because nothing could ever be as terrible as the experiences of Ravensbruck,” says Shoshanah.
“She drew a line under all these experiences and only wanted to think about nice things. She was of the opinion that you should only look forward and not back.”
As for the Templers, the Jews of Palestine resisted their return, as many had expressed pro-Nazi views.
In 1946 the Haganah assassinated their leader, Gotthilf Wagner. Later, four more Templers were murdered in order to drive out the group. The former Templer colonies were re-settled by Jews.
In 1962, Israel paid compensation to property owners whose assets had been nationalised.
