Hello and welcome to the History Etch Reportcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling

History Magazine.

I'm Ellie Corporn. Today you'll be hearing from the author and journalist Rosie Whitehouse.

Rosie's most recent book, The People on the Beach, tells the story of a group of polychor

survivors who boarded a ship from Italy to Palestine in 1946, taking on the might of the

Royal Navy in the process. She spoke to BBC History Magazine editor Robatt R. Rosie, especially

in recent times there have been a large number of books written on the Holocaust. But this

is a story that I certainly haven't come across before and I don't imagine many of our

listeners will have done. So how did you first discover it? Why do you think it's remained

relatively hidden?

I was researching a guidebook to the Italian Riviera and I'm interested in post-war Italian

history. So I began to click on the names of the towns putting in 1945, 1946 afterwards

and I was amazed that when I put in Savona in 1946, up top this story about this illegal

immigrant ship which arrived at the tiny port of Vardo which is next to Savona in the

middle of the night and spirited away over 1,000 Holocaust survivors. I thought this

is an extraordinary story. We have as a family long connections with LaGuria and my father-in-law

was in shipping in LaGuria. So when I began to ask family friends about this story, I was

amazed to actually just see people's complete blank faces and nobody knew anything about

it. And as a journalist I immediately realised that this was actually a really good story.

So the first thing that I did is that I went to the beach. Now we have said this beach

is on the Italian Riviera but don't get any ideas about Glitsy Port of Fino. Vardo is

a really work-odd port and it's where you go to catch the car ferry to go to Corsica.

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