Joshua and Isadora

On December 3, 1944, the Toros debarked from the Romanian port of Constanta bound for Istanbul.

Among the 1,000 or so passengers was twenty-year-old Isadora Rosen. She was with her younger brother, Yisrael. Their parents, dead. They were two of the 600 orphans on board who had somehow emerged from the frozen ghettos and camps of Transnistria—the "Forgotten Cemetery" of the Holocaust in what would prove to be a test run for Hitler's Final Solution. There, Isadora had lost most of her family, a few of her toes, and almost her life. The refugees on board, all survivors, were heading for Palestine, where some hoped to help build a new nation, and others to just rebuild their lives.

Also on board was Joshua Szereny. A Czech citizen, he'd escaped over the Apuseni Mountains from a Jewish slave labor unit in the Hungarian Army, while the unit was being marched toward a train bound for Auschwitz. The rest of his family had already been sent to Auschwitz, though he didn't know it. Once in Romania, he learned of the boat bound for Palestine. Upon arriving in Constanta and making contact with the organizers of the refugee mission, his name was instantly recognized, since his father had been one of Czechoslovakia's most prominent Zionist leaders. He was invited to sail to Istanbul and was asked to take charge of all aspects of passenger life during the journey. It was in this capacity that he stumbled across Isadora, crying on deck, when everyone was supposed to be down below. Joshua and Isadora—married three days later on a train rattling across the Turkish countryside, with no common language between them—were to become award-winning author Michael Benanav's grandparents.