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April 13, 2007
Fighting for freedom of Jews
Veteran Fred Carsh was among the first to witness the rebirth
of Israel.
KELLEY KORBIN
Fred Carsh not only lived through some of the Jewish people's most
devastating and formative times in modern history, but he played
an active role in many of these events.
At 84, Carsh comes across as a gentle, intelligent and grandfatherly
man – nothing in his friendly smile belies his larger-than-life
heroic past. Yet start asking him questions and he opens his steel-trap
memory to unravel story after story of luck, survival, courage and
valor.
Escape from Germany
He was born into an affluent, semi-Orthodox Jewish family in the
industrial city of Essen, Germany, in 1922, where his father was
established in the garment trade. Before Hitler came to power and
forever altered the path of German Jews, Carsh went to shul regularly
with his parents and attended a Jewish day school.
As a young man, Carsh was strong, confident and happy. But, as he
witnessed the increasing persecution of Jews by the Nazis, he also
developed a capacity to erupt into a powerful rage at the sight
of injustice. It is precisely this anger that he credits with saving
his life.
One fateful day in 1938, after his father had died from injuries
sustained during the violence of Kristallnacht, Carsh was faced
with the force of his fury when a group of young Nazis were lined
up, waiting outside his school gate.
"We came out of school and [there were] about 30 Hitler Youth
in uniform ... they were there to beat up the Jews. We were about
11 kids and little did they know we had just finished a course about
three weeks before in judo. We were laughing and they couldn't figure
out why we were laughing – you see, here was our opportunity
to find out what we learned in judo.... They were older than us;
they were in uniform with knives and the whole shebang, the leather
belts and the swastikas, of course.
"We decided what to do with them. We opened the gate, we came
out and, about three minutes, later it was all finished. We lined
them up sort of five this way and five the other way and we flattened
them all.
"That probably saved my life. We were very angry young boys
because of what they did to the Jewish people."
He added, "I was very angry. I was ready to pounce on the Hitler
Youth and the Nazis. I have the opinion that if the Jews would have
resisted, I think the Nazis wouldn't have done what they tried to
do."
After the altercation, Carsh went home and told his mother what
had happened. "She had the foresight to take me out of the
house and hide me with some Christian friends," he said.
Sure enough, the next day, the Gestapo came to Carsh's house looking
for him. When his mother told them he wasn't there, the Gestapo
told her that her son had 48 hours to leave Germany or be taken
away. Carsh mused that the Germans wanted him out of the country
because, in his words, "I was a shit disturber."
Luckily for Carsh, he had a passport at the time. He still has this
passport today, with its prominent "J" to identify him
as a Jew. He keeps the document almost as if to prove to himself,
if no one else, that he was once that strapping and handsome young
man who so fortunately escaped the terrors that would have awaited
him had he remained in Germany.
At any rate, because he had a passport, and because the German government
was at the time allowing Jews under the age of 17 to leave the country,
the Jewish Agency in Berlin was able to issue Carsh an emergency
exit visa. By the time he got the visa, Carsh, at 15, had precious
little time to pack a very small bag, say goodbye to his mother
and younger sister and board a train bound for Italy, where he was
"dumped" in a seaside warehouse district to await transport
to Palestine with 300 other Jewish youths. (It wasn't until many
years later that Carsh was reunited with his mother and sister,
who both managed to survive the war. His mother had been hidden
by nuns in a convent in Germany for the duration, while his sister,
Inge, survived Theresienstadt concentration camp and married a German
inmate she met there.)
Carsh has fond memories of his days onboard the Galilea, bound for
Haifa. He said the food was wonderful and he had the opportunity
to try olives for the first time.
Once the ship arrived in Haifa harbor, Carsh said the "not
very friendly" British soldiers eventually let them off. They
settled Carsh and 28 of his boat mates in a kibbutz near Afula in
March 1939.
Carsh said that, at the time, he didn't realize how lucky he was
to get out of Germany.
"I went from childhood to adulthood. I never had a chance to
be a teenager. We were two days in the kibbutz and they already
put us on guard and taught us to use a rifle and automatic weapons."
But Carsh was too ambitious to be happy standing guard and learning
farming techniques on a kibbutz. He wanted to learn a trade, preferably
in electronics. So, in conjunction with his kibbutz, the Youth Aliyah
office got him into an engineering program at the Technion.
Before he had time to complete his studies, the Second World War
erupted and Carsh, at 18, was encouraged to join the British army.
Again, he didn't want to sacrifice his opportunity to learn a trade,
so he agreed to join the army as long as he could continue his education.
The British agreed and, during his service in the Royal Engineers
of the British army, Carsh was able to take correspondence courses
in engineering and study in his free time.
"The other guys went to town and chased the girls and I was
sitting there and studying and my friends said to me, 'Fred, you're
crazy, you don't know if you'll live tomorrow, you might get killed,
what are you studying for?' Today, I'm glad I did."
Carsh was first stationed in Egypt for training camp, where, he
said, the Jewish soldiers did very well with guns because of their
experience on the kibbutzim.
The British kept Jewish soldiers together in their own brigade "because
we wanted to fight the Germans," said Carsh. "I was so
sour with the Germans, I was ready to murder them after what they
did to the Jews." The British put them against the Waffen SS
division, he explained, "because the British were not our friends
anyway...." Why weren't the British friends? Carsh answered,
"Because, at the time, the Arabs had the oil. We had nothing."
But, perhaps despite itself, the British army helped the burgeoning
idea of a nation for the Jewish people by training volunteer Jewish
recruits like Carsh. He said, "We learned the job in the British
army and it helped us [later] in the Israeli army."
In fact, when he returned to Palestine from service after the war,
he qualified to live in a special neighborhood reserved for former
British army soldiers. He said that this neighborhood, populated
by men with experience fighting in the Second World War, became
"the nucleus for organizing the Israeli army."
Helping Palestine
During the war, Carsh was first stationed for two and a half years
under the hot sun of the Western Desert. He then fought on the front
lines against the Germans in Italy, even going behind enemy lines
to pose as a German soldier. And if such heroics weren't enough,
once the Allies won the war in Europe in the spring of 1945, Carsh
and many others in the Jewish brigade of the British army voluntarily
extended their service an extra six months, in order to surreptitiously
help increase the Jewish population in Palestine. The plan had been
hatched in the bunks of the Jewish brigade troops months before
the war ended and was enacted almost as soon as the armistice was
announced.
Carsh explained his role: "Four days after the war, we went
into Munich under false papers with 20 trucks. We were stationed
on the Italian and Austrian sides of Germany. We went with false
papers to [supposedly] deliver tables and chairs to a transit camp
in Frankfurt three days after the war. Some of the trucks really
delivered those things.... We went into Munich to Dachau concentration
camp with 20 trucks.... We could take only the able boys and girls
that were in good shape and we loaded them up into the trucks."
Carsh said it was wrenchingly difficult to get the emaciated and
terrifed concentration camp victims into the trucks. "They
were afraid," he explained. "The ovens were still warm
even after three days – some thought they might be going to
another gas chamber. But we had the Magen David on our uniform and
'Palestine' written above it." These symbols seemed to give
the survivors some sense of trust.
"We took the [concentration camp victims] over the border –
the military police didn't have a clue what was in the trucks, we
went right through. We had 30 or 35 in each truck; we told them
to be quiet when we stopped, not to make a sound.... We took them
to camps in Italy in the Alps. We asked the girls if they knew how
to operate sewing machines and, since we couldn't get enough battle
dresses [uniforms] from the British army, because we didn't want
to make them suspicious, we made a few hundred of those battle dresses.
"The Jewish people from the Jewish Agency in New York helped
us a lot with money. We needed food, sleeping equipment and supplies.
When the guys were in good shape and a little bit fattened up (after
three or four weeks, we could see how they gained weight on their
bones), they had to learn my soldier number [from Carsh's soldier
book, which is another artifact he has managed to hold on to] by
heart, they had to learn how to operate a rifle and – now comes
the beautiful thing – one real soldier usually went with a
party of 40 [now trained, concentration camp victims] on 'vacation'
to Palestine with our soldier books and lots of ammunition and rifles....
The kibbutzim usually took [these refugees] in and then the real
soldier collected the soldier books and went back to Italy and the
next transport went."
In this fashion, Carsh explained how, unbeknownst to the British
government, about 200 of the 2,100 members of the British military's
Jewish brigade helped fortify and populate the Jewish population
in Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel.
A future in Canada
Carsh has many more stories about sneaking Jews and ammunition into
Palestine, including fixing up old boats and using them to transport
people illegally into the British-controlled country. In fact, Carsh's
first wife (who passed away in 1972) came to Palestine on one of
those boats.
After six months of clandestine operations in Europe, Carsh returned
to Palestine, where he got a day job working as an engineer for
the Iraqi Petroleum Co., bringing gas into Palestine.
At the same time, he also worked with the Haganah (the Jewish
paramilitary army in Palestine) and its more radical offshoot, the
Irgun.
When Israel was declared a state in 1948, Carsh immediately left
his job and became a sergeant in the newly minted Israeli army.
He said he couldn't rise to a higher rank because, at the time,
his Irgun past prohibited any promotion beyond sergeant.
Carsh remained in Israel and fulfilled his military obligations
until 1955, when he was diagnosed with skin cancer, which he still
battles today. His military doctor told him to move to a colder
climate and that was the year Carsh emigrated to Canada with his
wife and three children.
Now he has a 24-year-old grandson who not only resembles his handsome
grandfather, but also flies an attack helicopter for the Israeli
Defence Forces and, in true family tradition, is studying to be
a electrical engineer.
Carsh is currently working on an autobiography. When asked why he
thinks he survived his tumultuous past, he reckoned, "You come
to a point where you say, 'I'm invincible.' "
Kelley Korbin is a freelance writer living in West Vancouver.
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