On 19 March, 1944, the day of the German invasion of Hungary, and with no connection to it, Zoli Hochhauser (later known as Israel Harari), travelled to Kolozsvar (Cluj), at that time a border city between Hungary and Romania, in order to steal across the border into Romania and the unknown, to avoid being sent to the Russian front with the forced labor units.
Members of the local Hanoar Hatzioni movement came to his aid. They found a smuggler and Zoli reached the city of Torda (Turda) in Romania, and from there, after numerous hardships, reached Bucharest. Upon arrival, he notified Rafi Benshalom of successfully reaching his destination.
That is how the Tiyul (a Hebrew word meaning outing or trip) Operation to Romania began, and became a project with many activists. Passageways were also found near the cities of (Szeged, Békéscsaba, Nagyvárad-Oradea), and connections were made with smugglers. Nearly 15,000 young Jews stole across the border between 19 March and 23 August, 1944, and travelled to freedom, instead of to Auschwitz.
Smuggling people was a complicated and risky business. First, a group had to be formed in Budapest and individual preparations made for each person. Everyone needed suitable clothing and forged documents, and had to carefully review the details of their new identity. Each traveler needed both Hungarian and Romanian currency, and was instructed on how to behave during the long train journey, where to meet the smuggler and how to recognize him. They also had to learn what to do in a foreign city in the evening hours, how to send word that the border had been crossed safely, and what to do on the Romanian side.
In Hungary, the escaping youths had to elude the rings of security forces, the army and the secret service agents, who constantly sought to identify and capture disguised Jews on their way to the terminal in Budapest to purchase train tickets. After that, throughout the long hours of the journey, they had to avoid drawing attention, and present their documents calmly and naturally to suspicious inspectors. The escapees had to reach the first big city on the Romanian side – Arad or Torda. The Hungarian-speaking Jews there helped the escapees who did not speak Romanian, to continue their journey to Bucharest, and from there to somewhere else…
The multiple dangers in this operation sometimes resulted in failures, and there were incidents when travelers were caught on the train, at the border cities or even on the Romanian side. The key players in the human smuggling organization were members of Hanoar Hatzioni – Moshe Alpan, Hanna Grünfeld (Ganz), Yehuda Levi, Asher Arányi, Menahem Tzvi Kadari and Ya’akov Deutsch.
The organized smuggling operation came to an end on 23 August, 1944, when Romania’s allegiance was given to the Soviet Union and declared war on Germany. The Romanian-Hungarian border became the front line.
The notations in the community ledgers of the cities of Arad and Torda, show that approximately 15,000 young Jews crossed the border illegally between April and August of 1944. This operation, which saved the escapees from extermination, is unprecedented in its scope during WWII in German Occupied Europe. Everything was done at the initiative of and organized by the underground Zionist Youth Resistance Movements – the young people who overcame all the obstacles. They joined the small Jewish population in Eretz Israel (Palestine) in 1944-45 and played an active role in the 1948 War of Independence.
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In the period between the outbreak of WWII, in 1939, and August 1944, when Romania left the Axis (the countries allied with Hitler) and began fighting against Nazi Germany, 13 ships sailed for Eretz Israel from Romania via the Black Sea, carrying some 13,000 illegal immigrants. These ships included the Struma (769 passengers) and the Mefkura (394 passengers), both of which sank under tragic circumstances. Even after 1944, while the war continued to rage, boatloads of illegal immigrants continued to depart from Constanza, with the active assistance of the Jewish leadership in the Union of Jewish Communities in Romania and the involvement of emissaries from Eretz Israel. Two of these emissaries parachuted into Romania that summer – Yeshayahu (Sheike) Dan and Yitzchak (Meno) Ben Ephraim.
