PEOPLE With Big Heart : (friendship without borders - Dr. Miodrag ...

THE CANDLE AT THE DOORSTEP IS
BURNING OUT
At the end of autumn 1939, three unusual looking boats
docked on the Danube River near Kladovo. Aboard
these boats were the Jews from Eastern Europe who were
trying to escape Nazi pogroms, bound for Palestine, the
land of their ancestors. They were from Czechoslovakia,
Poland, Austria (already forcefully annexed into the Reich
by the “crazy Austrian corporal”), Hungary, as well as some
Yugoslav territories. They were well aware that the countries
in which they were born and had lived for centuries,
and which were succumbing, one after another to the
German racist madness, had nothing else to offer but more
gas chambers, mass-graves and new “crystal nights”.
Those three boats, later replaced by ordinary barges, looked
like Noah’s Ark from the Old Testament aimlessly trying
to find its new Ararat. For, Romania had already denied
the crossing into the Black and Mediterranean Sea
over its territories; England, who at the time held Palestine
as its protectorate, did not allow immigration into its
provinces; and most cities in Yugoslavia, too, afraid of Hitler’s
reprisals, were unwilling to help these unfortunate
souls. The situation was absolutely desperate for most people
who were spending the freezing winter on the ice-
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