Appendix 2:

Alda: Regarding Joseph (Bebe) [Zisman] Mouchly’s parents I can tell you what I heard second hand, that is from my husban Joseph and other people. [The father] Carol (Haim) was born in Barlad and had other brothers there. In all there were four brothers and sisters: Mihai (studied medicine in Switzerland) and afterwards returned to Bucharest; Bernard was the youngest brother and he immigrated to Israel in the mid-1950s during the Mass Aliya; one brother remained in Barlad and died there; the sister Carolina married someone from the Zisu family, Lazar Zisu.

Besides the doctor all of them were employed in the family stores that sold iron goods and agricultural machinery to farmers, lending them equipment at the beginning of the season for they paid in installments. In the twenties they opened a small bank in Barlad together with the Zisu family, in order to arrange the financing in an orderly way. In 1929 when the world economy collapsed, they lost the bank. Carol also had a corner shop of iron goods on Strada Regala, the main street of the city. They lived on the top floor and the shop was on the lower floor. Carol died from typhus in 1931-1932 when Joseph was eleven years old.

The mother Sofie (Sarah) Goldstein, who was not born in Barlad, but either in Roman or Jasi or some town between them, married Carol before World War I. Sofie had many brothers.

One of Sofie’s brothers was the doctor [Alda has his photograph]. His daughter was an only child, who immigrated to Erez Israel and has subsequently died. The doctor and his family lived in Vienna for many years.

Two more of Sofie’s brothers immigrated to Erez Israel and they were already old and Alda never met them. She did meet one brother, whose name was Zigmund. He had a son who was a lawyer and She met him with his wife. The son, his wife and father all arrived in Israel within a short time in 1951. This son had a son who studied in the Technion. After two years Zigmund remained in Israel, but the rest of his family emigrated to Canada. They visited him several times before his death.

She did not know the others. Perhaps they had already died. (There was also a sister who died at the relatively young age of twenty.) Sofie’s two sons were the elder Leon, born in 1907 and the younger Joseph, whose name was actually Roger Otto as it appears in his Romanian birth certificate, born thirteen years later. [The Romanian birth certificates are an important source for detailed information about the family – the consist of two pages with a great deal of family data.] When he came to Erez Israel in 1959 Leon brought with him a framed embroidery regarding which it was unclear whether his mother Sofie or his sister made it. I point this out because that is all that he brought – the rest was lost because they were afraid to take documents on their possessions, home etc. out of Romania during the Communist period. Leon was well educated; he studied economics in the thirties in Vienna and finished his studies in Belgium. Before World War II broke out he returned to Romania and worked in the family shop in Barlad. In time of the Legionnaires like other Jews in the city he was forced to wear a yellow star of David, but was not taken to the camps.

S.R.: I was born in this city in January 1941 and I remember that there were two unusual things in our home: “the yellow badge” and a square bar of soap the size of laundry soap. My parents told me, a child of three, that it was sacred and should not be touched because it was made out of Jews. But let us return to our subject. At the time of the conquest of Romania by the Soviet Union in August 1944, the younger brother, Joseph, your husband-to-be, had already been living in Erez Israel for a number of years, and his mother perished in the Struma. What did the older brother do after the conquest?

Alda: Under the Communists he worked for the first years in some bank and then in some state institution. They took their house away, that is both the shop and the flat, and they immigrated to Israel in late 1950s. By the way, just after the conquest the shop was converted into a department store for soldiers or Russian workers who were in charge in the area. Later on the Romanian authorities destroyed all the houses in the area and turned it into a public park. I would like to add that Leon, who was called Nashu, and his wife Cecila [called: Cili] had no children. In Israel he worked in a number of odd jobs as a new immigrant and afterwards for many years in the Customs Office, first in Beer Sheva and later in Haifa until retirement. He died many years after Mouchly.

S.R.: Naturally I am interested in as much detail as possible regarding Joseph’s mother Sofie, who perished in the Struma.

Alda: Sofie decided to go to Erez Israel in order to be with her son Joseph, even though her other son Leon remained in Romania. Joseph was her youngest; he was so young when he left for Erez Israel and she missed him, thinking that he was alone and single and young, still in need of his mother’s presence. Her other son was married, so she decided to sail on the Struma.

From Istanbul a letter arrived and afterwards something via the Red Cross, but I do not remember from where.

S.R.: I would like to hear some more details from you regarding Carol, your husband’s father.

Alda: There was a story in the family that father Carol wanted to do something for Barlad and he invited an architect to build a theater, in the style of European theaters with gilt decorations. The disappointment was great. The theater did not turn a profit, and the losses were great. Having no choice, he sold it. Finally the theater burned down.

I did not know whether this was a true story until one day, after I immigrated to Israel, Leon (Nashu) came and told me that in a letter to the editor of the Romanian newspaper [in Israel], Viata Nostra, someone wrote that he could not forget how Carol Zimsan would showed films in the afternoon and he would invite the children to sit in a certain row. He had an enormous library.

S.R.: Please tell me about your husband-to-be Joseph’s immigration to Erez Israel.

Alda: Joseph was born in 1920 in Barlad and immigrated in 1940 on a legal ship with a certificate as a student in the Technion – his mother paid the Technion. He studied for about one year. He did not go directly to study. He was a Beitarist. First he went to Rosh Pina and joined a Beitar group, to which his childhood friend Bernard Sulitzianu belonged. He was not accustomed to the very difficult life of the group in Rosh Pina, and he developed an ulcer and was hospitalized in a hospital in Haifa. [34a] After his recuperation he did not return to Rosh Pina, but worked in a number of odd jobs. In letters that his mother sent to her son in Erez Israel Sofie wrote naturally how much she missed him. That is no doubt why she sailed on the Struma.

After his mother’s death in the Struma Joseph played the violin in Haifa coffee houses in order to make a living. All his possessions were lost. The documents testifying to the fact that she had bought two plots of ground in the Ahuza neighborhood of Haifa also sank to the bottom of the sea with her. She thought that when she came to Erez Israel she would be able to rely on her possessions, but with her death nothing was left to her son. Afterwards Joseph went to Netanya and worked in a diamond factory belonging to a good friend of his parents – Weizman. After Netanya Joseph returned for half-a-year to the Technion. After his mother’s death in the Struma in February 1942, when they came to enlist volunteers into the [British] army, he enlisted along with his childhood friend Bernard Sulitzianu [in July 1942] into the British army. He served with his unit in Egypt and later on in Italy.

At the end of the war, in 1945, the two of them, wearing British army uniforms, took a train to Vienna, and from there via Hungary to Budapest, Bucharest and Barlad. Two other Jewish boys in the same unit also traveled to Romania, and did not return to Italy. They informed their commander, who agreed tacitly, but let them understand that he had no responsibility.

S.R.: I do not understand how soldiers were able to travel for a long time to Eastern Europe.

Alda: The truth is that the English gave them a month’s leave because many soldiers wanted to see if there were any survivors in their family. It was sort of unofficial, but those who traveled knew they did so at their own risk.

S.R.: What did Joseph tell you about what he saw in Barlad in 1945?

Alda: Joseph was not in Barlad in the end because his brother was in Bucharest at the time visiting his Uncle Mihai, and Joseph went to Bucharest and heard from him what had transpired during the war. Joseph looked up his friend Edith, who he found. She was married and had a child.

On the way, returning to Italy, they traveled on a Russian train from Bucharest to Vienna. That was a grave error, since the hygenic conditions were terrible and Joseph caught a parasite that penetrates beneath the skin from the Russian soldiers. In fact it was a shame that he did not do what other Jewish soldiers who had gone to Romania did at the time. Before returning to Italy they went to the British embassy in Bucharest and said that they had gotten lost by mistake and the embassy returned them to their units. From what Joseph eventually told me, I learned that the journey on the train with the Russians was very difficult, for appalling hygienic reasons among others, and he in fact discovered upon his return with this train that he had caught the parasite.

S.R.: When exactly did he go to Romania?

Alda: In my opinion it was in November-December 1945. In 1946 they already returned to Erez Israel.

S.R.: This matter needs clarification because Prof. Sulitzianu, whom I interviewed two weeks ago, claims that it took place in September 1945.

With your permission, I would like to ask you a personal question. How did you meet Joseph?

Alda: I met him in Siena, where their unit was stationed for most of the time that they were in Italy. They were about 80 guys from Erez Israel, who were very close with each other, since they served together in Egypt and in Italy. You will be interested to know that Joseph fought briefly at El-Alemein and afterwards returned to his unit. During that time, before and during the Battle of El-Alemein, he did a sapper’s course and afterwards fought briefly at El-Alemein. Afterwards he returned to his unit near Cairo, which was called “524 Royal Engineers” within the Eighth Army.[35] [The Fifth Army was the American army. The British Eighth Army, commanded by Montgomery, reached Italy via the Tyrrhenian Sea.] First they arrived in Taranto in Southern Italy and afterwards in Siena. There I first met Joseph at a Hanukkah party afterwards in the home of a girlfriend of mine who had a birthday party.

The British units had clubs in Siena and the Erez-Israel Jews had their own club that had belonged to the elite of Siena. In other words they liked them very much there.

The Erez-Israel soldiers were wonderful boys, but nevertheless they felt very lost because of the Shoah, because before the end of the war many had hoped to find their families that remained in Europe, but regarding whose fate they had no information. At the end of the war most of them learned that their families had been exterminated.

We got married in Italy, and when Mouchly returned to Erez Israel in 1946 and was released from the army I came after him separately. When we arrived, we went to visit his parents’ friend, Weizman, in Tel Aviv. He offered him a job running his factory in Netanya. Joseph consulted his friend Sulitzianu, who advised him to take the job in order to set him self up economically before returning to his studies at the Technion. Finally, we decided first of all on studies since the British promised to pay tuition to the Technion with an annual scholarship.

Weizman understood our decision and even gave my husband a number of calling cards of his friends in Haifa. That is how we reached the engineer Jacob Mouchly, who gave Joseph a job and the two became good friends. He had confidence in my husband and his qualifications. My husband studied at the Technion until the War of Independence broke out, and then other problems started: My husband, who was drafted during the War of Independence was injured removing mines, and spent many months in the hospital, undergoing four or five operations of plastic surgery in his hand. By the way, since he was an officer they suggested that he change his name to a Hebrew one. He went to Mouchly and discussed with him how to change the name Zisman to Hebrew since its meaning was “sweet” and Mouchly suggested that he take the name Mouchly because in Hebrew it means “my ruler.” My husband agreed, but it is important to point out that that there was no official family connection, but everything was a product of Joseph’s deep friendship with him and his children.

I would like to add that in 1948 the link with the other family friend, Weizman, was cut off, and we do not know what happened to him; most probably he left Israel.

On June 8, 1984 [Joseph] Mouchly died at the age of 64