A Trip to School

Thin, dark-eyed Isaac Allal was the child of a poor tailor in the squalid Tunisian village of La Marsa; he grew up with the pale face and the weak lungs of a ghetto child. Then one day last month a glorious vista opened for him. Relief officials told the Allals that Isaac could go to a convalescent camp in Norway, and from there to Israel.

Isaac did not know what a "convalescent camp" was; to him it meant school. At twelve, he could neither read nor write, and school sounded wonderful. At Tunis airport, Isaac and 27 other children from Tunisian slums boarded a Dutch DC-3. Their destination: the convalescent camp for Jewish children at Holmestrand, in Norway.

That night, while the weather lay thick and foul over the Norwegian coast, the control tower at Oslo airport received a garbled message from the DC-3's pilot. Forty-two hours later, after searching parties had scoured the countryside in vain, a lumberjack walking near Oslo Fjord heard the thin cry of a child. He found the wreckage of the DC-3; sitting primly in his seat in the plane's tail, his safety belt fastened, rain-soaked and spattered with oil, was Isaac Allal.

All the other children, the crew and three nurses, were dead. Miraculously, Isaac had suffered little more than a black eye and a sprained arm. The child smiled at the lumberjack and said in halting French: "I have come here to go to school. Take me to the school."

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