Sam Axelrod: "It was a trip that affected all of my life from that point". My family, originally from Russia, escaped to Lithuania after World War I and the Russian Communist Revolution. The family migrated to Palestine in 1925, and, at the onset of World War II, I volunteered to join the Jewish Brigade of the British army. I was seventeen years old. In 1945, at the end of the fighting in Europe, our Battalion was stationed on the border between Austria and Italy. I was asked to join a group on a fact-finding trip to the Mauthausen concentration camp across the Danube from the city of Linz, Austria. It was a trip that affected all of my life from that point. As we arrived, I saw a group of men wearing prison stripes and looking like ghosts. One man, approximately six feet tall and weighing maybe fifty or fifty-five pounds, approached me slowly. He moved toward the brigade’s insignia, a Jewish star, which was imprinted on the wing of the half-track truck we were driving. “You are Jewish,” he said. “I am Jewish, too. From Hungary.” The Jewish survivors were in turmoil. It was a time when the Russians let the allies into Berlin and Vienna in exchange for advancing up to the Danube River, which would put Mauthausen in their jurisdiction. American MPs were stationed all along the bridge, not allowing any freed survivors to cross it. Their policy was, “The Russians are taking the area, let them have the headache that comes with it.” The Jews feared that Stalin was as bad as Hitler and that they were doomed to stay in concentration camps. Our group, so far from our base, lacked transportation. We hired a German truck and trailer, filled it with Jewish survivors, and crossed the blocked bridge with the help of some Jewish Gls. We returned to Italy and organized transportation for displaced Jewish people from all over Europe toward the ports in the south. Any kind of available boat was used to smuggle the refugees to Palestine through the British navy’s blockade. To get through the many roadblocks, we had documents headed by the acronym TTG, which expressed the resentment we felt when the whole ugly story of the Holocaust unveiled before our eyes. The letters stood for the Arabic-Yiddish combination of the phrase, “Lick My Behind Business.” After the war, I studied for one year at Syracuse University, but was called back to serve in the Israeli army during the war of independence. I married my fiancé, whom I had met in Syracuse but who had come to live in Israel. The austerity in the country at that time was too much for her and I resigned my rank of major, and we came to live in the United States. Sam’s second wife is a Holocaust survivor who hid during the war as a Catholic orphan to survive. Sam wrote a book entitled The Wolf and the Lamb: The Case for Jewish Secularism.
