Another fascinating bit of history regarding the Jewish community of the island of Rhodos emerged a few years ago. A leader in the Cape Town Sephardi Jewish community, Jo Mallel, discovered more about his aunt’s wartime experience for the first time through an enquiry about a name etched onto a roof tile in Germany.
Jo explains: “A few years ago, I received an email from someone named Manfred Deiler in Germany, who was involved in the restoration project of some barracks at a Nazi labour camp called Kaufering. During the restoration project, he noticed four names etched out on a roof tile in one of the barracks. He contacted me because he was trying to find out whether anyone knew who these people were. One of the names was Allegra Mallel, the name of my father’s sister.”
Jo had never heard of Kaufering camp – in fact, most people do not know of this camp. And he did not know that his aunt had ended up there, so this information has added to his knowledge about what happened to some (just a few) of the Jews from Rhodos.
Kaufering, near the town of Landsberg in Bavaria, fell under the control of Dachau. It was only built in late 1944, the goal being to use Jewish slave labour to construct three underground bunkers for use as a facility for the production of German warplanes. The bunkers were to be built underground as a protection against Allied bombing. In the end, no aircraft were manufactured there because the camp
was liberated just a few months later at the end of April the following year.
Meticulous in their record-keeping, the Germans had written down the names of all those transferred from other camps to Kaufering. The list was sent to Jo by his German contact, and among the people transferred to Kaufering were 90 people from Rhodos, including
Jo’s aunt.
Conditions at the Kaufering camp were particularly harsh, and many of the prisoners died from hunger and disease. Although she survived until liberation, Allegra Mallel was in extremely poor health and died in 1945 after arriving in Bologna, Italy, following the liberation of the camp.
Jo’s father had left Rhodos before the outbreak of War, settling in the then Belgian Congo, and Jo himself spent his early childhood there. He still maintains a great deal of contact with the Congo but today lives in Cape Town.
“The discovery of the name on the tile – and the fact that I found out about it because of someone in modern-day Germany – means a great deal to me,” Jo says. “I feel a stronger connection to the aunt I never knew through discovering more about her terrible experiences from the etching on that roof tile.”



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