The son of Itzhak El Al, one of 28 Jewish Tunisian children who were on the plane that crashed in Norway in 1949, reflects back on his father's good fortune. 'The Norwegians even built my family's home on the moshav,' he says.
Published in Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2024-11-26/ty-article-magazine/.premium/75-years-ago-this-jewish-boy-was-the-sole-survivor-of-a-disastrous-plane-crash-in-norway/00000193-5e4a-d68e-a1db-fe4ec66f0000
STOCKHOLM – Seventy-five years ago, on November 20, 1949, a Dutch Douglas DC-3 aircraft was approaching Oslo on its way to Fornebu, Norway's main international airport at the time.
Confronting bad weather conditions, the pilot lowered the plane, apparently not aware of the exact height of the mountainous terrain. Its wing hit a tree not far from Hurum, a small community southwest of Oslo, and disaster followed: The plane crashed into a mountain, igniting the fuel tank. Except for one 12-year-old child, Itzhak Allal, all other 30 passengers on board – 27 of them children – and four crew members were killed.
Although the tragedy happened in Norway, it was very Jewish. The plane had been chartered by the Youth Aliyah organization (Aliyat Hano'ar) to transport Jewish children from Tunisia to a recovery center in Norway, before their planned immigration to Israel.
They were heading to a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients made available by the Norwegian government for Jewish children from North Africa. In April 1949, 200 Jewish children from Morocco were hosted there for the first time, and the Jewish children from Tunisia were the next group in line.
Haim El Al and his son Itzhak, named after his grandfather, visit the 1949 Hurum air disaster site in Norway. Credit: Rami Kafarov.
It took two days until the wreckage was discovered by two hunters, who also found the dead bodies of the passengers and crew as well as the only survivor. Allal was handed over to the Norwegian authorities and aroused so much sympathy in the country that King Haakon VII offered to adopt him.
The bodies of the other children were flown back to Tunisia where they were buried.
Allal was taken to Israel where he was eventually united with his family who immigrated to Israel and settled in Yanuv, a moshav near Netanya. This agricultural community had been partly built with Norwegian funds, following the air disaster. Allal changed his last name to El Al, and he and his wife Lilian would eventually have six children. He died of cancer when he was 48.
One of the couple's children, Haim, now 51, visited Norway for the first time last week. He came with his 15-year-old son Itzhak, named after his grandfather and born, coincidentally, on the 60th anniversary of the tragedy.
The two family members of the sole survivor of the accident were invited to attend a series of events to mark the 75th anniversary of the crash, organized by the Israeli embassy in Norway and the Friends of Israel in the Norwegian Labor Movement association (Venner av Israel i Norsk Arbeiderbevegelse).
"I've felt a strong connection to Norway my whole life," Haim El Al said in an interview after visiting the site of the disaster, "so it's really emotional for me to be here for the first time."
When you were a child, did your father tell you about the accident and the tragedy he was part of as a 12-year-old boy?
"My dad died young, when I was only 13. But we heard plenty of stories at home. My father talked about the two planes which took him and the other Jewish children from Tunisia to Norway. He remembered the story well – one aircraft arrived safely and the other, the one he was on, made a stop in Belgium because of a faulty radio. As we know, that was the plane that crashed in the Norwegian forest outside Hurum.
"He talked about being discovered two days later by the two Norwegian hunters and about how he survived in the cold and the darkness – drinking water from a nearby stream, eating apples from the bags and boxes that the children had on the plane and warming himself by the warm parts of the engine and the motor oil that kept on burning. He said that one of the people who found him gave him his coat. I was at the site just now with my son and we were freezing after just 30 minutes. He was there for two whole days."
Do you think your father was traumatized? As a boy, did you feel he was still under the influence of this tragic event?
"No, the Norwegians took care of his rehabilitation very well. They treated him in a wonderful way. They gave him presents and even the king of Norway, who was very touched by his story, gave him a bicycle. When dad came to Israel, he became famous, everybody knew him and his story. When his parents, my grandparents, immigrated to Israel, the Norwegians even built them a home, which is where I grew up."
דיויד סטברו 